Частный капитал влиет более 6 млрд долларов в программы индивидуальных встреч на выставках

Over $6 Billion Later, Private Equity Is the Biggest Buyer of 1:1 Meetings Backtrack Co-Founder Hunter McKinley contends the biggest checks in B2B events—roughly $6.7B since 2024—are chasing scalable, data‑rich 1:1 meeting programs If you want to know where trade shows are headed, just follow the money. Private equity has led roughly $6.7 billion in disclosed deals (the real number is higher: neither the Millennium nor the Questex terms were made public, so two of the recent deals aren't counted at all). For event companies over the past two years—and if you actually read the deal announcements—you’ll notice they keep highlighting the same thing: curated, pre-scheduled, one-to-one meetings. 1:1 programs used to be a nice perk bolted onto a trade show, and somewhere along the way it became the thing the buyers are actually paying for. The cash injections to these massive programs seem to all require the same thing: unprecedented growth on top of the already unprecedented growth. From what I’m hearing, there’s only two material ways to accomplish the outlandish goals: buy more shows (more revenue) and technology (more margin). That combination is why the money won’t stop, and it explains almost everything else happening in our corner of the industry right now. Every week I hear the same story: 1:1 programs are quickly becoming THE model as folks are waking up to the need to prove ROI. Last month an organizer with a portfolio of more than 300 trade shows told me they plan to launch hosted programs across all of them next year. Another one said it will double its hosted buyer events next year. We first noticed the pattern back in Q3 of last year, and it has only picked up speed since. Hosted buyer meetings are breaking records The meeting counts are breaking records on their own. IMEX Frankfurt 2026 reported a record 73,000 pre-scheduled meetings. IBTM World 2025 topped 79,000 pre-scheduled meetings, up 8% from the prior year. Hyve said it powered more than 160,000 meetings across its portfolio in 2025. Meanwhile, longtime operators are seeing the same curve. LeAnn Koenig, Vice President of Operations at VerticalXchange, told me: “One trade show we have worked with for many years has increased their meeting participation by over 400% in the past seven years.” No wonder big deals are flowing in. Five big deals in 24 months A look at what’s happened since 2024: - Hyve Group, home of Shoptalk and HLTH, agreed in June to be acquired by Hellman & Friedman in a deal reported at $1.8 billion. The announcement names Hyve’s “highly curated double-opt-in meeting programmes” as a growth driver. - CloserStill Media took a new investment from Searchlight alongside Providence in May, in a deal reported at £1.35 billion, roughly $1.8 billion, making it the second-largest trade show sale on record. The announcement calls out “digitally enabled one-to-one meetings and roundtables” as a key expansion area. - Apollo acquired Emerald and Questex to build a combined North American B2B events platform. Per Apollo’s announcement, Emerald stockholders received $5.03 per share, implying an estimated enterprise value of approximately $1.5 billion for Emerald alone. Questex terms weren’t disclosed. - The Millennium Alliance, a company built almost entirely on curated executive assemblies and 1:1 meetings, took a majority investment from BV Investment Partners, which said it will “expand digital and data capabilities.” Terms weren’t disclosed. - Informa acquired Ascential in late 2024 for a reported $1.6 billion, bringing Money20/20 into its portfolio. That’s roughly $6.7 billion in disclosed deal value, about $5.1 billion from private equity, with Informa’s strategic acquisition making up the rest. The pattern is hard to miss: these buyers keep paying premiums for companies that are very good at putting the right buyer across the table from the right supplier. The most telling line in any of these deals came from Hunter Philbrick, the Hellman & Friedman partner behind the Hyve acquisition. Here’s how he explained the firm’s thesis in the announcement itself: “As AI reshapes global commerce, we believe the ability to foster human connections and bring people together will be more valuable to businesses than ever… We believe Hyve has built an exceptional platform to capture this opportunity – a portfolio of genuinely irreplaceable commercial moments, powered by AI-driven matchmaking that turns a physical gathering into a year-round ecosystem.” The firm that just paid a reported $1.8 billion sees the asset as meetings powered by AI matchmaking. Providence’s exit statement credited the same two levers: “7 strategic acquisitions and 5 key event launches” plus “significant investments in technology.” There’s a similar tell in the Millennium deal. BV’s announcement doesn’t describe Millennium as an events company at all. It calls it a “peer-to-peer sales enablement platform” delivering “bottom-of-funnel lead generation.” For those who are paying attention, this clearly means they’ve unlocked ways to quantify ROI beyond a badge scan and lower in the sales funnel towards closing which explains their growth. The newly acquired aren't sitting still, either. Hyve finished its three-year growth plan a year early, immediately launched a successor plan called Ascend30, and made two acquisitions under it in quick succession — including yesterday’s purchase of RAISE Summit, MACHINA Summit, and Signal Week to form an AI 'SuperVertical.' The model isn’t new, but the tech around it is To be fair, the 1:1 meeting format wasn’t invented by a deal team. VerticalXchange, which is celebrating 25 years in business, said it has hosted more than 40,000 one-on-one strategic meetings since 2001. The model has quietly worked for more than a quarter century. What’s different now is everything wrapped around the meeting. AI matchmaking figures out who should meet in the first place, assistants like ChatGPT and Claude help people walk in prepared, and AI notes capture what is actually said. Put those together and, for the first time, someone can take a meeting with a clear line to ROI and report on it more accurately than ever before. A model that already worked just got supercharged with a modern engine. Every major organizer is building meeting tech This is where the growth and the money converge, because the biggest names in the industry are all shipping meeting technology right now: - Clarion Events ran AI matchmaking across its Gift & Souvenir hosted buyer shows and, according to a Grip case study, saw one show’s meetings jump 44% year over year, with 100% buyer engagement on booked meetings across the portfolio. Clarion has since launched Clarion Connect, a division dedicated to this format. - Questex built Q Connect, a platform to scale curated matchmaking across its entire portfolio, months before the Apollo deal. - Money20/20 launched Sm∆rtMeet, an AI-enabled matchmaking program that pairs suppliers with qualified decision-makers. - RX is betting on a browser-based platform with no app download to run the attendee experience at its shows. - Informa’s Connect Marketplace runs its hosted buyer program on AI-powered appointments in focused, nine-minute meetings, up to 40 per buyer. Matchmaking is what got the industry this far. From what I can tell, the next wave of investment is going toward what happens inside the meeting and after it. The people running these events feel the shift daily. CommerceNext, part of CloserStill Media, used Backtrack’s AI meeting intelligence at its last show to capture what happened inside its 1:1 meetings. (Disclosure: Backtrack is my company, so this is the part of the tech stack I know firsthand.) Kim Mancuso Telford, Executive Vice President at CommerceNext, told me why that data matters more than ever: “Sponsors are making much more disciplined decisions and requiring stronger business cases. More this year than ever before in my career, they’ve been asking us for very specific data so they can build a case to prove ROI and justify any future investment. With the proliferation of large-scale conferences all vying for the same sponsors and attendees, there’s just greater scrutiny on ROI. Having this data is crucial, and for us, it’s how we differentiate in the meeting space.” And when the ROI can be tracked over time, the numbers get striking. Koenig illustrated it perfectly: “A security vendor who has participated in our program noted that in the decade that they have participated in our program the one-to-one meetings have generated more than $20 million in sales for their company.” What I’ve seen firsthand From my standpoint, organizers are clearly bringing in the investments to make big bets on 1:1 meetings. The brands taking the meetings tell the same story. At Connect Spring Marketplace this year, AI note-taking was available inside the hosted buyer meetings, and what struck me wasn’t the technology so much as who embraced it. The most enthusiastic users weren’t the tech-forward startups, they were the biggest brands in the room, Topgolf among them, all leaning hard into curated meetings as a sales channel. Jordan Grimes, Director of National Events at Topgolf, put it this way: “At larger events, you meet so many people in such a short window that remembering every detail becomes nearly impossible. Backtrack gave me an instant reference point for every conversation. Instead of sending follow-up emails asking for information we had already discussed, I could immediately pick back up where we left off. That kind of speed and context increased my selling capacity by around 30%.” A 30% lift in selling capacity from better notes sounds almost too simple, but it points at something I keep running into: the constraint on hosted buyer ROI was never really the quality of the matches, it was the human bandwidth inside the meeting itself. Where this goes next Here’s how I read the flywheel: PE growth math demands acquisitions and technology, which has given independent organizers an extra reason to launch a hosted program now, since it grows revenue today and makes the show a more attractive acquisition tomorrow. This year’s SISO CEO Summit put together a CEO M&A panel, and its speaker roster included the chief executives of Hyve, Emerald, Questex, and Clarion, the very companies in the deals above. Vincent Polito, CEO of SISO, told me: “CEOs come to the SISO CEO Summit to explore buying and selling events. That’s long been a key role of the Summit. The newest thread this year was 1:1 meetings, which kept surfacing in conversation. Deal activity is rapidly accelerating in this clearly emerging area.” The pieces connect: PE needs acquisitions, shows launch hosted programs to grow and get noticed, and the technology that runs those programs is suddenly in demand everywhere. And here’s the part that makes the boom more striking: those record meeting numbers were set while the Middle East conflict has more than 100 Gulf events cancelled or on hold, including many 1:1 program launches we were part of. The hosted buyer boom is happening despite the industry’s fastest-growing region largely offline. Skeptics will point out, fairly, that hosted buyer programs have real problems: no-shows, structurally lopsided economics, and the “forced appointments” critique that has followed the format for years. They’re right, but that critique is exactly why the tech investment matters. You can’t fix what you don’t measure, and for the first time the quality of the meeting, not the badge scan, is becoming the unit of measurement in our industry. Billions of dollars are now betting that the 1:1 meeting is the future of trade shows. The organizers who win won’t just be the ones who book the most meetings, they’ll be the ones who can prove what those meetings were worth.