ES. Coming from a background of working with Fortune 500 companies like UPS, BMW, ADP, and Equifax, what inspired you to transition into entrepreneurship and build solutions for the events industry?
Siva Krishna Vangala. My journey into entrepreneurship started with a very clear vision in 2018, even before COVID. Coming from a technology background and having worked with Fortune 500 companies like UPS, BMW, ADP, and Equifax, I had seen how large enterprises use automation, data, and integrated systems to improve efficiency. When I looked at the events industry, I saw a major gap. Event organizers were depending on multiple vendors for one event — one agency for the website, another for marketing, another for registration, another for exhibitor management, another for WhatsApp or email campaigns, and another for onsite execution. Because of this, their data was scattered across many platforms, and they had very little control over their own customer profiles. That is where the idea of EventTitans was born in 2018.
The vision was to build a comprehensive event platform where organizers could automate the end-to-end process — from event website, registrations, sponsors, exhibitors, attendee engagement, virtual exhibition, and post-event data management — all under one ecosystem. Even before virtual events became mainstream during COVID, we wanted to help organizers showcase sponsors and exhibitors online before, during, and after the event, so that people who could not attend physically could still experience the event digitally. During COVID, this vision became even more relevant, and we conducted many virtual events through EventTitans. Later, when I moved to India, we expanded strongly into onsite registrations, badge printing, on-spot registrations, and complete ground-level event execution.
ES. You identified critical inefficiencies in event registrations and on-ground management that led to the creation of Tickets99. What were the biggest industry gaps you noticed, and how did you design technology solutions to address them?
Siva Krishna Vangala. Tickets99 was created in 2022 as a focused extension of our larger EventTitans vision.
While EventTitans was built as a complete conference and exhibition management ecosystem, we noticed that many social event organizers, expos, small exhibitions, and mid-sized conferences could not afford large upfront technology costs. They also did not have proper control over their registration data, ticketing revenue, marketing tools, and customer communication.
The biggest gaps I noticed were:
Organizers were using separate tools for website, ticketing, WhatsApp, email, registration, exhibitor portals, and marketing. This created confusion, increased cost, and distributed their valuable customer data across multiple agencies. Many event organizers were also losing revenue due to duplicate tickets, manual entry, lack of proper tracking, and poor onsite control.
Tickets99 was built to solve this with a more scalable and accessible model. Instead of asking every organizer to pay a heavy upfront cost, Tickets99 allowed them to use a professional event ticketing and registration platform through a revenue-share or transaction-based model. We built solutions such as online ticketing, QR-based check-ins, onsite POS, badge printing, WhatsApp and email confirmations, live dashboards, promoter tracking, and secure ticket validation. The goal was simple: give organizers control, reduce dependency on multiple vendors, protect their data, and improve the attendee experience.
