Twenty years of investment in the picks and shovels of live events
‘Picks and shovels’ is one of the oldest ideas in capital allocation. In a gold rush, the reliable money was never in the river; it was in supplying the people standing in it, because a supplier gets paid on every claim, whether or not the claim pays out.
Which raises a question worth asking about our own industry. If organisers are the miners, who sells the picks and shovels?
Hopin thought it did. It was worth $7.75bn in August 2021 and in liquidation by 2024, because it sold tools to organisers while underwriting the opposite of its customers’ business. A shovel maker cannot bet against the mine. Cvent, meanwhile, selling registration and the basics of event tech, has changed hands four times in twelve years: NYSE listing in 2013, Vista in 2016, a SPAC in 2021, Blackstone at $4.6bn in 2023, and has been worth more nearly every time. In December 2025, it spent roughly $700m buying Goldcast and ON24. The boring registration company bought the companies that were going to make registration obsolete.
So, the shovels are real. They are just not where the headlines were.
I’ve assembled the record: a 45-transaction deal table across the B2B live-events supply chain since 2007, sourced to primary announcements wherever they exist. Five layers emerge.
The halls
Blackstone bought the NEC Group in 2018 for a reported £800m, and Amadeus catering and The Ticket Factory came with it. Apollo runs the Venetian Expo, 2.3 million square feet and home to CES. Onex built ASM Global out of SMG and AEG Facilities, then sold it to Legends in 2024. Commercial venues have been institutional assets for years.
The production layer
PSAV passed from Kelso to Goldman Sachs and Olympus to Blackstone, where it became Encore. Three owners, rising every time.
The floor
GES went private with Truelink Capital in December 2024 at $535m. Platinum Equity took Czarnowski from the Nagle family in January 2026. Freeman, the largest contractor, remains family-owned, and bought Sparks from EagleTree in 2023, so it is bidding in the same auctions.
The agencies came last, but not to private equity. MCI had Iris Capital in 2010. Opus took Fan Creek’s capital in 2015. What arrived around 2023 was industrialisation: a repeatable market where one sponsor sells to another. EagleTree bought PRA from CI Capital, then Opus from Growth Catalyst. Riverside took Impact XM and used it to pull Jack Morton out of Omnicom. Shamrock backed Nth Degree, which then acquired INVNT. And Blackstone’s Encore bought FIRST in December 2025, the AV platform swallowing the agency layer whole.
Then follow the ownership up a level, and it stops being about tools at all.
An exhibitor at a Clarion show at the NEC stands in a Blackstone hall, potentially catered by Blackstone, scanned by Blackstone software, lit by Blackstone AV. The house owns the table, the chips, the lights and the door. Apollo owns Emerald and Questex, operates the Venetian, and a majority of Atlético de Madrid. Providence Equity has owned three major B2B organisers: Clarion, Hyve and CloserStill, alongside theatres, staging and a stake in the architects who design the halls.
Announcing the Cvent deal, Blackstone’s David Schwartz called the events and travel recovery “one of Blackstone’s highest-conviction investment themes”
This is not synergy. These assets frequently sit in different funds at arm’s length. What it shows is category conviction at investment committee level. Announcing the Cvent deal, Blackstone’s David Schwartz called the events and travel recovery “one of Blackstone’s highest-conviction investment themes.”
Which leaves one rule. Everything that augments the handshake compounds. Everything priced on replacing it eventually gets repriced.
Boring compounds.
Find my full analysis and the searchable 45-deal dataset here.
