How Ivvy CEO Lauren Hall grew Ivvy to $18.5M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is lauren hall she's the founder of ivy a multi-award-winning technology company providing enterprise software to the events industry since its 2009 launch she's overseeing ivy's continued growth and global expansion to apac europe and north america offering the world's first real-time marketplace with live availability for function space and suppliers lauren are you ready to take us to the top i am indeed all right tell us about the company what do you do and and what's your business model are you a pure play sas company we are but we actually a little bit different in the fact that even though we have a fully sas model because we have three enterprise applications which is providing solutions to meeting planners to venues uh which manage their functions-based group accommodation it's their full sales and catering system uh as well as inventory and time-based management systems for suppliers we're actually in the industry of travel and the events industry there's only a big major player like sabre so what sabre does for travel they digitize the online experience for booking for accommodation flights on car hire we're doing that for meetings and events so basically we are a global distribution platform known as a gds but in order to achieve a gds which is the entire price software connection and distribution engine and one you have to build the technology at the source of the supply chain so we built operating systems to be able to manage their live availability rates and inventory of the supply chain we then connected them into our marketplace which then enables all of that supply chain to then have consumers and event organizers book in real time and that was really a huge problem it was something that i experienced many times over having teams organizing events which was really truly a way to be able to solve a global problem so you make money every time someone uses your platform to book an event venue i'm assuming you're taking a referral cut or something like that yeah so what we do is we've got an enterprise sas license fee we've got a transaction fee we've got usage fees we've got multiple revenue streams that come across our platform so we're not just sas so we're obviously transactional model as well yeah if you look at your last 12 months in terms of total revenue what percent of it was just pure software not usage not anything else just pure soft sass um probably eighty-five percent is processed because we're only just yeah yeah predominantly now because we're now only now moving into our distribution model so what we do is we power the platforms for like american express uh flight center globally we're we're building at the distribution b2b platform play so our goal is to be able to bring those who already own that customer base which is enormous markets as an example the top five travel management companies of the world control over 100 billion dollars worth of meetings and events spent because they already service the travel market for those big large corporate customers but there is an enormous opportunity that sits anything between two zero to 200 packs for events which they don't touch and that needed to be a self-service solution so we built that platform so lauren just to be clear who is paying you the sas fee the event the event space all the suppliers pay us their stats because we are their everyday operating systems wait so just to be clear again we don't know who the suppliers are we don't know your business so you're talking about the meeting space itself yeah so like we provide our systems big hotel chain groups systems where they're their everyday operating day-to-day solution as well as their booking engine that sits on the front of their website so we actually connect all the pieces of underutilized assets that have never been online before so as an example you ultimately at the moment can book accommodation for travel but you could never book accommodation for groups which could be 50 to 100 packs when you're organizing an event so let's say you mean people people yeah so that yeah it's as people so as an example let's go back all the way to the beginning the biggest problem with organizing an event that it can take up to six weeks to be able to source and access and get people to respond to an inquiry okay you go backwards and forwards negotiating between a venue and a supplier and the potentially the corporate that you are either organizing it for or on behalf of now the reason for that exists is because there's been no systems that sit at the supply chain so there's been no ability for these um sales and catering systems that sort of venues or inventory management systems that sit um in suppliers that actually connect online that make available the inventory time available and rates for those solutions yeah lauren just sorry i'm going to cut you off but we are short on time i totally get the product it makes perfect sense to me i totally understand why you're doing it it's a huge problem i get it so i want to dive more into i want to get more capture more of your story here so so walk me through kind of a timeline what did you launch company what year i launched ivy in 2009 i started building the first uh platform for meeting and event organizers much like what you see event in the states we built that cvent platform here in australia my journey started back in south africa when i built the first platform to solve that corporate meeting spend problem to be able to be able to provide availability rates and inventory online when i originally built the platform i had massive demand um it outstripped the capability of its uh uh how i'd been built and engineered i had to re-engineer that platform to start again because it had been built in asp.classic not in a php or a.net and um i obviously have bootstrapped that company for a couple of million have you bootstrapped this current company oh no now we've got capital we've got significant capital so we've raised quite a lot how much have you raised to date uh well we're now close to nearly 26 million okay and was that all equity or any of that convertible debt or convertible notes uh we did some convertible notes we've done some um in terms of um majority equity uh but yeah we're in a massive growth path at the moment so we basically so going back on and looking at your timing so i built the first platform in south africa from a timeline i had funded that for about three million of my own cash that was in 2008 okay okay um um like 2006 it took me two years to build that uh take it to market commercialize it i then ran out of funds i then was awarded i went to the south african government i was awarded 10 million from the government because of the national benefits is that included is that included in the 26 no no this is excluding because within two days of me being awarded those funds i was then given access to australia i left south africa because i witnessed the brutal murder of my father and i chose to leave the country so i took my two young kids and started the game so i entered australia with no money no job no network i started again i recapitalized the company i you know started out brought in a good co-founder we built up our first phase we built and commercialized that now and we're now currently in 13 countries how many customers are you serving oh we've got about 25 000 now okay these are like again hotel hotel chains event locations hotels restaurants uh meeting planners corporates not-for-profits because we've got multiple uh customers across the globe um i mean we work with it people can get onto our platform in many different ways you know they can either sign up and be part of the marketplace which is their online rfp tool they can be part of the sas system which is a full operating systems they can use our meetings tech to take all the registrations and payments and processing for their events you know there's multiple layers with an iv in terms of where people can actually utilize that on just the sas aspect what are these companies and i know you have many different cohorts but at best you can on average what are these companies paying per year or per month for the sas component of your tech look at ranges like you know uh from a small uh restaurant it can take anything from 50 to 100 a month on the sas and then uh for large hotel change it's you know can be anything from 250 to 500 a month it depends on the size because we you know as a hotel chain we also provide all the central rare systems we're integrated into their property management would you say to lauren that you lean towards the higher end of that maybe 150 or 200 bucks a month on average or no you're really long tail smb no no i think we lean to the higher end definitely because we're working on global groups um and typically because there's a lot more complexity if you're looking at the restaurant areas which is very simple stuff okay there may be a lots of smaller players but definitely i think we sit in the enterprise space uh particularly across the market so lauren can i take the hundred dollar kind of per month average times the 25 000 customer number you just gave me i mean that obviously puts you at about 2.5 million bucks a month on the software and is that accurate uh no that's probably not i mean we're sitting probably closer between the 10 to 20 million in revenue a year and you said about 60 of that is is or sorry 80 of that is sas yes majority cess yeah yeah that's great um i want to understand more of how you've signed this is incredible how you've signed up so many locations what's your growth i mean what's the number one growth channel look like look right now i mean majority of our time of the last nine years has actually been spent...