Naboo is making a direct bet that corporate events, a category responsible for roughly $500 billion in annual global spend, has been misclassified as a tactical cost rather than a strategic procurement category. The Paris-founded company raised a $70 million Series B led by Lightspeed in 2026, on top of a $20 million Series A in 2025, and is now pushing into North America after posting over 200% year-over-year growth and \u20ac120 million in event volume managed through the platform<\/a>. Its AI Planner claims to handle roughly 90% of sourcing research, with customers reporting hard savings of 5% to 15%.<\/p>\n If your organization runs frequent offsites, seminars, or large-scale team events across multiple business units, the question isn’t whether you’re wasting money on this category, it’s how much. The pattern Naboo is targeting is well-established in procurement circles: a high volume of sub-$20,000 requests, each touching two-plus suppliers, each generating its own approval chain and invoice, collectively consuming far more administrative overhead than their spend share justifies. That’s the tail spend trap, and most procurement functions have tried to solve it for travel and direct goods while leaving events largely untouched.<\/p>\n The product architecture Naboo describes, sourcing through payment through VAT reclaim in one environment, is the right shape for the problem. What’s harder to evaluate from the outside is whether the AI Planner’s “90% of research handled” claim holds across the idiosyncratic, high-stakes events that actually consume the most procurement attention. Automating routine venue searches for a 20-person off-site is not the same problem as managing a 500-person global congress with custom production requirements. Naboo’s answer is the white-glove service layer sitting alongside the software, but that hybrid model carries its own unit economics risk as the company scales internationally.<\/p>\n The longer-range ambition Eduardo signals, positioning Naboo as both an AI company and eventually a finance company with integrated payment and approval tooling, matters more than the current feature set. If Naboo embeds into ERP and procure-to-pay workflows the way Coupa or SAP Ariba own direct spend, switching costs rise sharply and the platform becomes a budget line that’s very hard to cut. Companies evaluating Naboo now are not just choosing an events tool, they’re deciding whether to hand a relatively new vendor a sticky position inside their financial infrastructure. That’s a different risk calculus than a SaaS subscription renewal.<\/p>\n Tail spend refers to the large number of small, irregular purchases that fall outside a company’s main procurement contracts, think of it as everything your sourcing team didn’t get around to standardizing. These transactions are individually minor but collectively significant, generating disproportionate administrative burden relative to their dollar value. Managing tail spend means bringing those purchases into governed workflows with approved vendors, which is precisely the inefficiency Naboo argues the events category has never properly addressed.<\/p>\nWhat this means for your business<\/h2>\n
Concept deep-dive: Tail Spend Management<\/h2>\n