Not even the people inventing AI always know what it’s good for besides writing emails. But there are seed-stage companies, like Y Combinator grad and 2024 Disrupt Battlefield participant Nowadays, that are doing something mind-blowingly useful with AI.
Nowadays uses LLM AI to automatically plan large, expensive events. Using its own database of 400,000 global venues and a proprietary model based on a combination of OpenAI, Anthropic, and its own coding, Nowadays emails venues, caterers, and the like to gather bids. It will even make phone calls to nudge a response to unanswered emails. It then organizes the information and presents it to the event planner, who can make decisions and sign contracts.
The company was founded in 2023 by sisters Anna Sun, CEO, and Amy Yan, COO, and has since been used to book over $4 million worth of events including for tech companies like Google, Amazon, Notion, and Supabase, Sun tells TechCrunch.
The idea came about after Sun graduated from MIT. Her older sister, Yan, was working at Google some years after graduating from Johns Hopkins. Eight years apart, both of them served as class presidents for their universities, each organizing many large events.
Sun recalls spending hours “calling ice cream trucks to get quotes” or the time she had to personally pick up 2,000 McDonald’s McNuggets because there wasn’t a way to arrange a bulk delivery and wishing there was an easier way.
Sun knew she wanted to found a startup to address this and, once the startup was admitted into YC in the summer of 2023, she talked her sister into quitting her Google job to help her.
“We got our acceptance letter the day before my graduation, and then within that day, Amy put in her two weeks’ notice at Google,” she recalled.
Nowadays is aimed at events with budgets of over $20,000 and its fees are based on budget, charging 5% of what it sources. Alternatively, events planners can sign up for an annual subscription. While it’s most often used for corporate events, it has been used to plan a wedding and a 50th anniversary, Sun said.
Anyone interested in using Nowadays begins by filling out an intake form to describe the event, location, budget and any specific needs.
“Some people are like, oh, I want meeting spaces that have high ceilings, because we have tall team members. So it can be very creative,” she describes.
Since it launched, Nowadays has been spreading mainly by word of mouth through its early users, who are mostly corporate event planners. One of them introduced Nowadays to a VC, who promptly invested $300,000. Then the customer wrote a check as well, Sun said.
Nowadays just raised a $2 million party seed round (meaning 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.
The startup joins an increasingly crowded field. Established players like Cvent and Eventbrite are adding AI tools to their offerings, for instance. And Partiful, the New York-based event-planning app, has been named Google’s app of the year.