Informa just bought the rooms. Here’s how startups get in
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Every week another AI agent promises to book your meetings, score your leads and write your follow-ups. So why did Informa just agree to pay £2.24 billion for a company whose product is a hall, a badge and a few days a year in Barcelona, Berlin, London or Atlanta?
On 6 October 2026, Informa agreed to buy Clarion Events from Blackstone, a deal Skift Meetings puts at about $2.97 billion, second only to Informa’s purchase of UBM in 2018. Clarion brings more than 100 B2B brands, including IFA Berlin, ICE Barcelona, DSEI and DISTRIBUTECH. Informa’s October 2026 investor deck projects the combined group at over 9 million attendees and 220,000 exhibitors by 2028.
David Adler’s analysis covers the deal itself. My question is narrower, and it’s the one founders ask me. What do the biggest shows in this portfolio do for startups and investors, what does it cost, and where’s the door? I checked ten flagships on their own websites.
The room gets more valuable as AI gets cheaper
In August I wrote about AI companies opening coffee shops while KKR and Liberty Media bought live events. This is the B2B version of the same bet. Clarion was bought out of Earls Court & Olympia for £45 million in 2004. Four sales and 22 years later, Informa is paying about 50 times that.
What Clarion Events sold for, 2004-2026
Each bar is a change of owner. Gaps between sales are uneven, and Clarion bought other businesses along the way.
I’m not saying every handshake is worth the flight. Adler’s review finds most attendance figures are organizers’ own and unaudited, and a Scialog study found engineered virtual sessions formed research teams about as well as in-person ones.
The strongest evidence still points one way. When Hurricane Isaac canceled the 2012 American Political Science Association meeting, would-be attendees became 16 percent less likely to co-author with each other (Campos, Leon and McQuillin, The Economic Journal, 2018). In a randomized experiment, small Chinese firms placed in monthly business meetings raised revenue 8.1 percent (Cai and Szeidl, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018).
When every inbox fills with AI-written outreach that sounds the same, the cold email loses value and the meeting gains it.
Nine of ten flagships have a startup door
What each show lists on its own site, checked on 15 October 2026. Startup and investor counts are the organizers’ own.
| Show | Startup program | Startup cost and eligibility | Investor access |
|---|---|---|---|
| IFA Berlin (Clarion) | IFA Next area, Pitch Battle, IFA Lab matchmaking | On request | Free, invite-only Investor Pass. IFA cites 1,100 investors |
| ICE Barcelona (Clarion) | Pitch ICE and the invite-only ICE Startups Accelerator | Free to apply | Investor sessions inside the Accelerator |
| DISTRIBUTECH (Clarion) | Initiate: kiosk, pitch and passes. Top three get a free booth at DTECH 2028 | On request. Under 25 staff, up to $15 million raised, under six years old | None listed |
| GDC (Informa) | GDC Pitch: 10 finalists pitch publishers and VCs | Start-Up Pass from $299, by application | Business Hall meeting space |
| Black Hat USA (Informa) | Startup Spotlight Competition: turnkey booth, theater slot, analyst call | Free entry, under five years old, under 50 staff | Innovators and Investors Summit, $2,499 |
| CPHI (Informa) | Start-Up Market: table-top stand, five tickets | €1,995, EU firms under 50 staff, never a full exhibitor | None listed |
| Money20/20 Europe (Informa) | Startup Hub pods with guaranteed investor meetings | On request. Early Stage under three years and €5 million raised | Investor Pass and investor meeting lists |
| LEAP (Tahaluf, Informa JV) | Startup Pods and Rocket Fuel, $1 million in equity-free prizes | On request | Investors Hub, and LEAP cites 2,000+ investors |
| WHX Dubai (Informa) | Xcelerate: 30 startups, $25,000 in prizes | No entry fee | 1:1 investor matchmaking |
| DSEI (Clarion) | No startup area in the current format. SME sessions and DSEI Gateway matchmaking | – | – |
Dates and venues for the next editions are on our event pages: Black Hat USA 2027, CPHI Frankfurt 2027, DISTRIBUTECH 2027, DSEI 2027, GDC 2027, ICE Barcelona 2027, IFA Berlin 2027, LEAP 2027, Money20/20 Europe 2027, WHX Dubai 2027. Program pages: IFA Next, Pitch ICE, Initiate, GDC Pitch, Startup Spotlight, Start-Up Market, Startup Hub, LEAP Startup and Xcelerate. Cannes Lions, also Informa, lists no startup program on its current site.
Free to pitch, pay to stay
The cheapest door is the competition. ICE, Black Hat and WHX charge nothing to apply. The prize is usually floor space: a turnkey booth at Black Hat, a 9 m² stand for the WHX champion, a free booth the following year at DISTRIBUTECH.
Only two shows publish a startup price, CPHI at €1,995 and GDC’s Start-Up Pass at $299. The rest ask you to contact sales. That’s normal in the trade, and it means a founder needs a first call to compare a pod in Amsterdam with one in Riyadh.
Investor access varies even more. IFA, LEAP and Money20/20 run dedicated investor passes or hubs, and Black Hat charges $2,499 for its Innovators & Investors Summit. CPHI and DISTRIBUTECH list no investor program. Pharma supply and the grid are capital-heavy sectors, and I’d argue a dedicated investor room would earn its keep at both.
One owner could build one front door
Informa already runs a central pricing calculator across about 85 percent of its B2B revenue, according to its 2025 Capital Markets Day presentation as summarized by Adler. It’s also building a “single point of access” for the companies that buy from it. Apply that to startups and you get an obvious product: one founder profile, one application, routed to the right show and the right investors. That’s the kind of tool we build at Sesamers with mytradeshow.ai.
GDC shows what’s at stake when an owner reworks the cheaper tickets. This year Informa replaced the $200 to $399 expo pass with a festival pass from $649, and attendance moved from almost 30,000 to about 20,000 (Skift Meetings, March 2026). The name and format changed in the same year, and GDC added a 1:1 meeting program and free childcare, so the pass price is one factor among several. Startup programs sit at the same end of the price list. They’re also where next year’s exhibitors come from.
Founders, apply here. Organizers, call me
So if you’re a founder planning 2027, remember why you go to a fair: to meet clients, with investors as a bonus. Start with the competitions: Pitch ICE, Black Hat’s Startup Spotlight and WHX Xcelerate cost nothing to enter. Check deadlines early, since Black Hat’s 2026 window closed on 27 May and GDC Pitch closed on 6 February. Before you pay for a pod, ask for the positions and fund names of the investors attending, which tells you how senior the room is. And use the investor matchmaking at IFA, Money20/20 and LEAP to fill your calendar before the doors open.
A word on our own work, with a bit of pride. At Sesamers we’ve spent the past decade pushing exhibition organizers to open their floors to startups and investors, and building those programs with them, including investor programs for shows that already draw a strong pool of startup exhibitors. Nine of these ten flagships now have a startup door. We can’t take credit for most of them, and the organizers did the hard part. Still, it’s good to watch the idea become standard.
If you run a show, ask yourself one question: in five years, would you rather count 300 startups that paid for pods, or 30 alumni who raised on your floor? If it’s the second, write to me.
