VenueNow is Australia’s largest marketplace for discovering and booking spaces for meetings and events.
It started in 2015 as one person’s idea. Eleven years, several pivots and a few acquisitions later, it is a multi-million dollar business, and we have been its development team the whole way.
This is the story of a fully custom platform built to grow and change with the business behind it.
2015: one idea
It started as Spare Workspace, one person’s idea and a first version we built from scratch.
Pivots along the way
The business changed direction more than once as it learned what customers really needed. Every pivot meant reshaping the platform without taking it offline.
Growth through acquisitions
VenueNow grew into a multi-million dollar business and acquired other companies along the way, bringing their venues and customers onto the platform.
Today
Thousands of venues, from local spaces to hotel groups like Accor and IHG, and an AI assistant that helps people find the right one.
A business that pivots needs a platform that can pivot with it. That’s why VenueNow is fully custom-built, with no off-the-shelf system holding it back.
The platform has two sides: a dashboard where venue owners publish and manage their spaces, and a marketplace where customers search, compare and send enquiries. Each new direction, from new types of venues to entire acquired businesses, could be built into the same platform instead of starting over.
We measure everything on the platform: every search, filter, venue view, enquiry and booking. This shows us exactly where people find what they need, and where they give up.
Every update starts from that data, not from guesswork. Small improvements add up: organic traffic has doubled year-on-year, and conversion rates grew 70% quarter-on-quarter after recent updates.
VenueNow offers a huge range of venues, but even with filters, finding the right options can still mean browsing through too many results.
We built Vera, an AI venue finder that lets users describe their event in their own words, then matches their needs against factors like capacity, budget, and dates to create a ranked shortlist of the best-fit venues.
This turns a lengthy search into a much faster path from describing an event to finding venues and requesting quotes.
We have been VenueNow’s development team since the first line of code. Through every pivot, acquisition and new feature, the platform kept running and kept growing, turning one person’s idea into the backbone of a multi-million dollar business.
We have been working with Borealis for more than 8 years now and the experience has been very positive. They have built the initial version of our system and kept on supporting it through the years. Their knowledge, support and professional approach has ben crucial to the success of our web platform, which is the backbone of our business.
