77. VenueScanner

Founder: Rebecca Kelly and Benjy Meyer
Founded: 2016
Website: www.venuescanner.com

The process of booking a venue is hard – it’s time consuming, complex, and costly. Owning and managing a venue is also hard – your event space can sit empty for days, weeks or even months. Well, that isn’t necessarily the case anymore.

Founded in 2016 by Rebecca Kelly and Benjy Meyer, VenueScanner has been described by Forbes as the ‘Airbnb of venue hire’. A venue search and booking platform, this company helps hosts generate bookings, and event organisers to find better, more affordable venues.

Industry-wide change is always a challenge, but this was an industry ripe for disruption. By providing technology to streamline the event booking process and giving venues a platform to market themselves, VenueScanner has risen to the challenge. With 25,000 venues now listed, it has now become the UK’s largest online venue booking platform.

From schools to churches, to warehouses or pubs, VenueScanner helps premises owners rethink the way they use their space, while offering an eclectic range of options for organisers to choose from. Traditional venue hire is expensive, and dominated by big players with huge budgets – VenueScanner is on a mission to level the playing field.

Used by some of the world’s biggest and best-known brands, including Facebook, M&S and the BBC, VenueScanner is making venue hire affordable, accessible and easy. We’d like to say ‘watch this space’ but they probably have that space filled!