Even the people who invented AI don't always know what AI is useful for beyond writing emails. But these days, some seed-stage companies are doing amazingly useful things with AI, including Y Combinator alumni and participants in the 2024 Disrupt Battlefield.
We now use LLM AI to automatically plan large, expensive events. Using a proprietary database of 400,000 venues around the world and a proprietary model based on a combination of OpenAI, Anthropic, and proprietary coding, we now collect bids by emailing venues, caterers, and more. I am. If an email goes unanswered, they may even call you to encourage you to respond. The information is then organized and presented to the event planner, who makes a decision and signs the contract.
The company was founded in 2023 by sisters CEO Anna Sun and COO Amy Yan, and has since been used to book $4 million worth of events, including for tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Notion, and Supabase, Sun said. told TechCrunch.
The idea came after Sun graduated from MIT. Her older sister, Jan, worked at Google a few years after graduating from Johns Hopkins University. Eight years apart, they both served as class presidents in college and each planned many large-scale events.
Sun said she spent hours “calling ice cream trucks and getting quotes,” and that she had no way to arrange bulk deliveries and wished there was an easier way. I remember the time I had to personally pick up 2,000 McNuggets.
Sun wants to found a startup to address this problem, and once the startup is admitted to YC in the summer of 2023, he convinces his sister to quit his job at Google. I did.
“I got my acceptance letter the day before graduation, and within the same day, Amy gave me two weeks’ notice on Google,” she recalls.
Today is for events with budgets over $20,000 and fees are based on the budget and will be charged 5% of the amount raised. Alternatively, event planners can sign up for an annual subscription. Sun said it is most commonly used for corporate events, but it is also used to plan weddings and 50th anniversaries.
Anyone interested in using Today begins by filling out an inquiry form describing their event, location, budget, and specific needs.
“Some people may want a meeting space with high ceilings because they have tall team members, so they can get very creative,” she explains.
Since its launch, Today has spread primarily by word of mouth through its early users, who were primarily corporate event planners. One of them introduced Today to a VC, who immediately invested $300,000. The customer then cut a check as well, Sun said.
Recently raised a $2 million party seed round (i.e. no lead investor) from VCs including Y Combinator, Basis Set Ventures, Hike VC, VentureUs, Underdog Labs, Decacorn Capital, SBXi, E14, and dozens of other angels. By the way.
The startup enters an increasingly crowded field. For example, established players such as Cvent and Eventbrite are adding AI tools to their products. And New York-based event planning app Partiful was named Google's app of the year.