This SaaS Startup Simplifying Event Planning By Bridging The Tech Gap In The Hospitality Industry

Hospitality industry draws a significant part of their revenue from event management related services like venues, skilled workforce and others. However, the process of closing a deal with customer has always been people-driven with less use of technology. Similarly, it has always been a time consuming and tedious process for enterprises to select a venue for holding an event. Against this backdrop, Spalba is a SaaS startup that has come with a technology-powered platform for venue owners and event planners, making the whole process seamless and cost effective. In an interaction with the Bizz Buzz, Spalba’s Founders - Vishal Puri and Naveen Gupta said that the company is witnessing good traction for its SaaS product across India. The company has also launched its product in APAC region and has onboarded hotels in Nepal as part of its international expansion plan

Can you provide a brief overview about the operations of ‘Spalba’? What was the motivation behind starting ‘Spalba’?

(Vishal Puri) I and Naveen (Gupta) both know each other from childhood. In the professional journey, while I worked in many technology companies, Naveen was leading event management professionals. We have many decades of experience in our respective fields. The idea for starting Spalba came when we saw that the difficulties faced by hospitality players like hotels, and venues along with companies, which are planning to hold events. Our experience showed that the whole process is riddled with complexity. Moreover, it is very outdated. Because, you know the first thing comes to any enterprise’s mind for holding an event is look for the right venue. And the entire process is very complicated and time-consuming. Moreover, managing the event like having right sitting arrangement, designing the whole event and others need considerable investment of time, energy and money. We saw that companies were incurring considerable cost in holding such events. That’s when we got the idea of starting ‘Spalba’. We are bridging a critical gap in the event industry, which makes the whole planning process efficient by leveraging modern technology.

Spalba was launched in 2020 and we have a goal of transforming event planning by leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Digital Twins, AI, and data analytics among others.

Spalba provides a SaaS-enabled venue marketplace that simplifies event planning for both venues and planners. The important features of our platform include real digital models of venues, that offers immersive showcasing capabilities, AI-powered event design tools with over 500 3D elements for customizable layouts, virtual reconnaissance and measurement tools for detailed planning, and data analytics to track engagement among others. So, through the help of these tools, venues like hotels, venue operators and other stakeholders showcase the minute details of their venues. Customers can do a virtual tour of the venue, see the sitting arrangement, view the design virtually before deciding on the venue. Before this, hotels usually showcase the photographs to the prospective customers. Convincing customers to book the venue on the basis of only pictures seem to be difficult. Through using Spalba’s SaaS platform, it has been relatively easy for hotels and venue operators to close a deal. Similarly, enterprises can now see the exact arrangement and customise the planning as per their requirement through our platform before booking the venue. In this way, it’s a win-win for both hotels and enterprises by saving their cost, time and energy. Moreover, by leveraging our platform, our clients in the hospitality industry have seen sound sales growth.

How is the overall adoption so far? Can you provide some views on the revenue generated from the entire entity?

Overall adoption has been very good so far and we are growing very fast. We count several marquee hospitality players in India as our clients. We see demand growing for our SaaS platform every quarter. We have onboarded over 200 properties as of now and it is growing. We now have access to more than 11,000 venues across 200 plus Indian cities.

Not only in India, but also there is fair amount of demand for our SaaS offering in other nations. We strongly feel that our solution can be replicate globally. We are expanding into the APAC region with some clients being onboarded in Nepal.

As far as revenue is concerned, our last year’s revenue was around Rs 40 crore. We want to highlight the fact that we have other streams of revenue coming from event planning space. We manage live events and have opened an office in Singapore last year. We have been able to generate Rs 16-17 crore revenue from such live event management space.

Can you provide some view on the pricing of your SaaS product? Is there a degree of cyclicality to your business?

Our pricing varies depending on several factors. I can provide a range of our pricing. The pricing varies between Rs 1 lakh to Rs 3 lakh. As far as cyclicality is concerned, we all know that there are certain months of the year, when events are more and there are certain months, wherein usually events are less. But as a SaaS product, our subscription are for longer period and that takes care of the cyclicality of the business.

You told us that Spalba is a market place. Is your platform enable both enterprises and hospitality players to be in one place? Please provide us some perspective on the technology features of your platform.

Spalba provides a SaaS-powered venue marketplace that simplifies event planning for both venues and planners. In that sense, we have suitable offerings for both event planners and venues. We are trying to balance supply (venues) and demand (event planners) in our platform. In the first phase, we have now a good number of venues in our market place. Most marquee properties, even venues in the tier-II and tier-III cities are using our product. So, we are witnessing good traction in this part of the business. Now, we are concentrating on the demand part of the business. It means we have started onboarding enterprises or event planners. This is at the initial phase. Going ahead, we will accelerate this process. Interestingly, we are witnessing a great amount of interest from enterprises to be part of this platform.

As far as technology features are concerned, we are leveraging digital twins, artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and other emerging technologies in our SaaS platform. As we onboard more and more clients, important data is getting created. From these data points, several insights are being created, which are useful for all our stakeholders.

Have you raised capital so far? Are you planning to raise capital in the near future?

We are bootstrapped so far and have not raised any capital. Our internal accruals are taking care of our growth plans. Going ahead, we may raise external capital depending on requirement.