Lanyrd is a social conference directory that aggregates bios, event details and post‑event resources such as slides, notes and videos. The site is community‑driven and works like a wiki, encouraging users to enter and edit event data. It is closely integrated with Twitter and recommends events based on your Twitter contacts. Lanyrd holds over 12,000 events, from large conferences to smaller home‑grown meetups. The product emphasizes making it easy to find who’s speaking or attending and to collect session coverage in one place. The founders are Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, and the company emerged from Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 batch. The team plans to expand its London staff and ramp up user acquisition using the new funding. Lanyrd bills itself as an "IMDB for conferences," pulling conference information from the Twitter accounts you follow to show speakers, attendees, sessions, links, and coverage. Conference pages include session lists, links to the conference site, iCal/Outlook export, related books, and embeds of videos, audio and slides via Embedly. Users log in with Twitter to see conferences their friends are interested in, edit their own conference profiles, and track future events they plan to attend. The product offers an API, JavaScript "Upcoming events" badges, and an email feature that delivers event info and updates. The site has over 1,169 conferences added and more than one-third of active users have made at least one edit. Founded by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, the team says it aims to help users meet people they follow on Twitter and intends to use recent funding to extend runway and focus on product and building a business.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Sep 2011