NextEvent Gets Backed by IIT Madras — Here’s What That Actually Means for Indian Banquet Halls
Most startup announcements sound the same. A logo. A press release. A line about “revolutionising the industry.” Then nothing changes.
This isn’t that.
In the summer of 2025, NextEvent was accepted into Nirmaan — the pre-incubator at IIT Madras. It’s one of the most competitive early-stage programs in the country, and one of very few in India dedicated entirely to turning raw ideas into real, scalable startups. We want to tell you exactly what that means, why it matters, and honestly — why we think it’s just the beginning.
What Is IIT Madras Nirmaan?
For those unfamiliar: Nirmaan is the first dedicated pre-incubator on a college campus in India. It supports students, researchers, and alumni who are taking their first steps into entrepreneurship — helping turn early ideas and prototypes into real startup opportunities through mentorship, seed funding, prototyping support, and access to the wider IIT Madras startup ecosystem. MaMITs
The institution behind it carries serious weight. The IIT Madras Incubation Cell has incubated 511 startups, with a combined valuation of over ₹53,000 crore, over ₹17,300 crore in investor funding, and over 700 patents. Companies like Ather Energy, Uniphore, and Agnikul all came out of this ecosystem. Banqetly
We’re not comparing ourselves to any of them. We’re just saying — the bar for getting in is high. And we cleared it.So Why Did IIT Madras Back a Banquet Hall Software?
Fair question.
The banquet hall and venue management industry in India is enormous — millions of events every year, across banquet halls, function halls, convention centers, wedding lawns, and auditoriums. And yet, the way most venue owners manage their business in 2025 is the same way their parents did it: pen, diary, WhatsApp, and hope.
Double bookings happen. Enquiries go cold. GST invoices get delayed. Revenue goes untracked. Staff make errors that cost real money.
We built NextEvent to fix exactly this. A mobile-first banquet hall management software, built for Indian venues — not adapted from foreign tools with no understanding of muhurtham dates, per-plate pricing, or the chaos of wedding season in tier-2 cities.
IIT Madras has been increasingly incubating startups across AI, SaaS, analytics, and fintech — sectors where Indian software can serve Indian problems better than anything imported. That’s the bet they made on us. We’re solving a real Indian problem, with software built specifically for it. Banqetly
What Nirmaan Actually Gave Us
Getting backed isn’t just a badge. Inside Nirmaan, we got:
Structured mentorship. Not generic startup advice — specific, hard feedback on our product, our market, and our assumptions. The kind that challenges you to think more clearly about who you’re actually building for.
Technical validation. The IIT Madras ecosystem has deep technical expertise. Having researchers and mentors stress-test our architecture, our AI follow-up system, and our conflict detection logic made the product sharper.
A network we hadn’t earned yet. Access to founders, investors, and operators who’ve built at scale in India. Introductions that would have taken years to make on our own.
Credibility that opens doors. When a venue owner in Hyderabad or Coimbatore asks why they should trust a new software over whatever they’ve been using for five years — being IIT Madras backed is a real answer. Not a marketing answer. A trust answer.
Where We Are Now
When we entered Nirmaan, we had a working product and early customers. Today, 135+ banquet halls, function halls, and wedding venues across India run their entire operation on NextEvent.
They manage bookings without double-booking nightmares. They generate GST invoices in seconds. They follow up on enquiries automatically — without someone manually replying to every WhatsApp message. Their AI assistant answers questions about revenue, occupancy, and peak dates on demand.
We’ve been rated 4.8 on Trustpilot. We offer 24/7 support in Hindi, Telugu, and English. We’re the only banquet hall software in India with built-in AI, muhurtham date tracking, offline sync, and iOS support.
None of that happened because of the IIT Madras backing alone. But the backing made all of it happen faster.
What This Means for Venue Owners
If you run a banquet hall, function hall, wedding lawn, or event venue in India — here’s what you should take from this:
NextEvent isn’t a side project. It isn’t a freelancer’s product or a generic CRM reskinned for venues. It’s a focused, well-resourced team backed by one of India’s most respected institutions, building software specifically for your industry.
The problems you deal with every day — missed enquiries, double bookings on muhurtham dates, manual billing, staff not knowing what’s happening — we built our entire product around solving those. Because we listened. And because IIT Madras pushed us to go deeper than the surface.
What’s Next
We’re not done building. There’s a roadmap ahead that includes deeper AI capabilities, more regional language support, richer analytics, and features built from conversations with venue owners across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and smaller cities where the real volume of Indian events happens.
The IIT Madras backing was a milestone. What we build next is the point.
If you manage a banquet hall and you’re still running on a register — try NextEvent. We’ll train your staff for free, migrate your data, and support you every step of the way.
Because that’s what being backed by IIT Madras actually means to us: the obligation to build something that genuinely works.
NextEvent is India’s banquet hall management software, backed by Nirmaan — the pre-incubator at IIT Madras. Trusted by 135+ venues across India. Available on iOS, Android, and desktop.
