Nowadays is an AI-powered event planning platform that acts as a copilot for the labor-intensive work of organizing corporate events, offsites, and retreats. The company was founded in 2023 by sisters Anna Sun, who serves as CEO, and Amy Yan, who serves as COO. Anna graduated from MIT and Amy from Johns Hopkins; both served as class presidents at their universities and organized numerous large events, giving them firsthand experience with how painful and manual the planning process is.
Corporate event planning is dominated by repetitive coordination: sourcing venues, sending dozens of outreach emails, fielding endless calls, comparing proposals, and chasing responses. Companies often pay full-time assistants or expensive tools, sometimes well over $100,000 a year, to manage this. Nowadays uses large language models combined with a proprietary database to automate much of this workflow, handling venue research and outreach, communicating with venues on the planner's behalf, and consolidating responses so a planner can make decisions quickly.
The platform's AI effectively functions as a tireless planning assistant that can run the outbound communication and follow-up that humans find tedious, dramatically reducing the time required to plan an event. By the time of its funding announcement, Nowadays had been used to book over $4 million worth of events, including for technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Notion, and Supabase, demonstrating real adoption among corporate planners.
In December 2024, Nowadays announced a $2 million seed round from a group of investors including Y Combinator, Basis Set Ventures, Hike VC, VentureUs, Underdog Labs, Decacorn Capital, SBXi, and E14, along with dozens of angels. The capital is aimed at further developing its AI planning capabilities. The company is based in San Francisco.
As a founder-led, Y Combinator-backed startup, Nowadays targets the underserved niche of corporate event and retreat planning, betting that an AI copilot can replace expensive manual coordination and become the default tool for planners at fast-moving companies.