Naboo: from Star Wars landmark to one of the most ambitious names in corporate event procurement
For years, “Naboo” belonged, in the public imagination at least, to the Star Wars universe: a serene, elegant planet with royal palaces, political intrigue and unusually good landscaping. In 2026, however, the name has acquired a second identity — one that sits much closer to procurement departments, finance teams and corporate event organisers than to science fiction.
Naboo is also a fast-expanding startup, and one with unusually large ambitions. Its thesis is straightforward enough: corporate event spend remains one of the least standardised, least digitised and least efficiently governed categories inside large organisations. The company’s response is to build an AI-powered platform capable of bringing order, control and measurable efficiency to that complexity.
That proposition has now attracted substantial backing. In February 2026, Naboo announced a $70 million Series B, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with support from existing investors Notion Capital, ISAI and Ternel. Coming less than a year after a €20 million Series A, the new round marks a decisive step in the company’s attempt to establish itself not merely as an event player, but as a global infrastructure layer for corporate event procurement.
A category that large companies have struggled to industrialise
Corporate events may look, from a distance, like a relatively ordinary operational expense. They are anything but.
For large organisations, event procurement often involves an unusual concentration of friction: changing requirements, multiple suppliers, internal approval chains, policy constraints, payment fragmentation, execution risks and limited global visibility. Even within highly structured companies, event-related spending frequently escapes the kind of discipline applied to other procurement categories.
This is the gap Naboo is targeting.
Rather than positioning itself as a conventional event agency or a simple booking tool, the company presents itself as a procurement platform designed for enterprise use. The aim is not just to help teams organise an offsite, conference or client event more quickly. It is to give businesses a way to standardise sourcing, centralise decisions, automate workflows and improve control over a historically disjointed spend category.
In practical terms, Naboo’s offer sits at the crossroads of several business functions: procurement, finance, HR, workplace, executive support and event operations. That cross-functional relevance is one reason the market opportunity looks larger than event management alone.
Why event procurement is becoming a boardroom issue
The change in how companies think about events is significant.
Internal gatherings are tied to culture, alignment and retention. Customer events are linked to brand, pipeline and strategic relationships. Product launches and partner moments have become central to go-to-market strategies. As a result, events are no longer treated as occasional logistical exercises. They have become strategic investments.
The difficulty is that many businesses still manage them with fragmented processes and inconsistent governance.
That creates a number of familiar problems. Supplier comparisons are difficult to standardise. Budget oversight is patchy. Policy enforcement varies from team to team. Payment journeys become cumbersome. Reporting is incomplete. Savings opportunities are easily lost. And the people responsible for delivery often spend too much time coordinating rather than deciding.
Naboo’s pitch is that this should not be accepted as inevitable. Its model is built on the assumption that event procurement can be managed with the same seriousness as other business-critical spend categories — provided the right infrastructure exists.
The logic behind the funding round
The latest fundraising is notable not just for its size, but for what it suggests about investor conviction.
Lightspeed’s decision to lead the round signals confidence in a broader technology story: that artificial intelligence, when applied to messy and operationally intense workflows, can unlock real value in enterprise settings. That matters because event procurement is a difficult proving ground. It combines unclear briefs, multi-party coordination, tight timing, compliance requirements and financial complexity. It is exactly the sort of category that is painful enough to need a better system, but difficult enough that many have avoided trying to build one.
Naboo’s argument is that this is precisely why the opportunity is so large.
The company is not trying to digitise a clean and already-structured process. It is going after a category that remains deeply fragmented and therefore highly vulnerable to inefficiency. If it can build a repeatable procurement model here, it may have the basis for something far broader.
A business growing quickly in a global market
Naboo has paired that strategic narrative with growth figures intended to demonstrate commercial momentum.
The company says it has reached $150 million in business volume, while sustaining 3x year-on-year growth for three consecutive years. It also reports zero churn across its corporate client base and claims a win rate above 90% in large enterprise tenders.
Those figures are accompanied by a roster of well-known companies said to be using the platform for both internal and external events, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, HubSpot, Figma and ElevenLabs.
On their own, such names always attract attention. But the more interesting point is what they imply. If major companies are using the platform across multiple types of events, Naboo is not addressing a niche workflow. It is tapping into a broader structural need.
The market context helps explain the scale of the ambition. Naboo places the global corporate events market at $400 billion, with especially strong momentum in customer and partner-facing formats such as conferences, launches and brand events. In that environment, the ability to bring visibility and control to spending becomes commercially important, not just operationally convenient.
Expanding beyond Europe
The funding announcement was also accompanied by a geographical milestone: the opening of a New York office, which becomes Naboo’s North American hub after Montreal.
This matters because the company’s proposition only fully works if it can operate internationally. Global clients do not want a patchwork of local tools and disconnected supplier relationships. They want consistency across markets, common governance standards and the ability to deploy the same operating model in more than one region.
New York therefore serves several purposes at once. It gives Naboo a stronger base for US commercial expansion, helps support multinational accounts already signed, and allows the company to deepen its local execution and partner network.
The timing is not accidental. Naboo says that the United States already accounts for more than 10 per cent of revenue after just five months. If that figure continues to grow, the company’s North American presence could become one of the defining factors in its next stage of development.
The product roadmap: from coordination to automation
The clearest indication of where Naboo wants to go can be found in the product priorities attached to the Series B.
An AI agent for autonomous booking
One of the company’s key projects is the deployment of a specialised AI agent capable of handling bookings in near real time, operating alongside Naboo’s existing concierge approach.
This is an important shift because it moves AI from supporting internal processes to directly shaping the customer experience. The promise is simple: faster turnaround, less back-and-forth and greater scalability without sacrificing relevance.
Embedded payments through an integrated corporate card
Naboo also plans to centralise payments through an integrated corporate card connected to customer workflows and systems such as ERP, procure-to-pay and HRIS environments.
This may sound like a back-office detail, but it is central to the procurement proposition. Fragmented payments are one of the persistent weaknesses of event operations. Bringing them into the platform makes the system more coherent and potentially much more valuable to finance and procurement stakeholders.
Tender optimisation powered by AI
Another priority is the use of AI to strengthen the management of RFPs and supplier consultations. Naboo says this could help generate savings of up to 30 per cent in some cases, depending on the event profile and sourcing conditions.
The significance here is less about headline percentages than about process maturity. If AI can help structure briefs, compare bids and accelerate decision-making, procurement teams gain both speed and leverage.
Moving into other fragmented spend categories
Perhaps the most revealing part of the roadmap is Naboo’s intention to apply the same infrastructure to other fragmented and compliance-heavy procurement categories beyond events.
This suggests that the company does not view corporate event procurement as the end market, but as the entry point. In that reading, events are the proving ground for a wider play in enterprise spend digitisation.
Building the organisation to match the ambition
Growth at this pace requires hiring, and Naboo has made clear that recruitment is part of the plan.
The company says it is expanding teams across Paris, Hamburg, Barcelona, Montreal and New York, with a particular focus on AI and data talent, enterprise sales, and senior leadership roles across people, operations, engineering and marketing.
Its forward-looking targets are equally bold: tripling revenue in 2026 and exceeding $1 billion in business volume by 2027.
Such goals are, by definition, ambitious. Yet they fit the broader posture Naboo now adopts in the market. This is no longer the language of a young startup testing product-market fit. It is the language of a company trying to set the terms of a category.
What the company says it is building
In the company’s own framing, the mission is to define a new global standard for event procurement.
Chief executive and co-founder Maxime Eduardo said the Series B would allow Naboo to combine procurement performance, compliance and automation at international scale, while using New York as a springboard for faster expansion in the US.
From Lightspeed’s side, Antoine Moyroud framed the investment around execution. His argument is that AI matters not when it produces interesting demos, but when it reduces coordination, improves decisions and creates measurable business value. In that view, event procurement is one of the hardest categories in which to prove that claim — which is precisely why success there could be so meaningful.
More than a memorable name
There is, of course, an irony in all this. Naboo remains one of those rare brand names that many people recognise before they know what the company does. That is useful, up to a point. But memorability alone does not create authority.
To win in search, in B2B buying journeys and increasingly in AI-driven discovery environments, the company needs something more precise: a clear association between the brand and the category it wants to own.
That is now the real challenge. When someone asks what Naboo is, the answer can no longer stop at a pop-culture reference. It must also point to a business building a serious position in enterprise procurement technology.
And that, increasingly, is what Naboo appears to be doing.
The broader significance
The company’s rise says something wider about the direction of enterprise software.
For years, some of the most operationally difficult service categories were left outside the reach of truly scalable software because they seemed too variable, too fragmented or too human-dependent. But AI, workflow automation and integrated payments are changing that equation. Categories once dismissed as “too messy” are now being reconsidered as major infrastructure opportunities.
Event procurement is one of them.
Naboo’s bet is that if it can bring structure, data, compliance and automation to this category, it can create value not just for event teams, but for procurement leaders, finance departments and multinational businesses looking to govern spend more intelligently.
That is the real story behind the headline.
So yes: Naboo is still the name of a famous Star Wars planet. But it is also something rather more commercially consequential — a startup trying to become the default platform for corporate event procurement, first in Europe, then in North America, and ultimately across the enterprise world.
FAQ
What is Naboo?
Naboo is an AI-powered corporate event procurement platform designed to help companies source, manage and optimise event-related spend.
Is Naboo only a Star Wars reference?
No. Naboo is also a startup founded in 2022 that operates in the corporate events and procurement technology market.
How much funding has Naboo raised?
Naboo announced a $70 million Series B in February 2026, following a €20 million Series A in February 2025.
What does Naboo want to achieve?
Its aim is to build a global infrastructure for corporate event procurement, combining automation, compliance, payment centralisation and procurement performance.
Why is Naboo attracting attention?
Because it is addressing a large, complex and historically under-digitised category with strong enterprise demand and a distinctly international growth strategy.