The global event and hospitality sector is drowning in administrative noise. Every incoming request—from venue inquiries to catering changes—is often incomplete, unstructured, and lands in a communication channel that demands manual triage. This administrative overload is precisely the problem Ghent-based startup Rookoo is tackling with AI-driven "digital colleagues," securing €900,000 in a new funding round to scale its platform.
Rookoo is not just building a chatbot; it is deploying smart automation designed to handle the messy middle of customer interaction. The platform intercepts incoming inquiries, regardless of whether they arrive via email, web form, or social message, and automatically organizes, categorizes, and converts them into clear, actionable tasks for human teams.
The funding round drew significant attention from the Flemish tech ecosystem, including entrepreneurs behind major successes like Showpad, Henchman, and Wintercircus, alongside institutional support from PMV and KBC Innovation Banking. This investor confidence signals a belief that the event industry, traditionally slow to adopt deep automation, is finally ready for a technological overhaul.
Jeroen Borloo, CEO and co-founder of Rookoo, frames the mission as a necessary shift in focus. “Event and hospitality teams spend far too much time on admin. We want them to be able to focus again on experience, creativity and hospitality,” Borloo stated. The current reality for venues like Wintercircus Ghent, Tour & Taxis, and Brussels Special Venues—all existing Rookoo clients—involves teams losing critical time to repetitive data entry and follow-up.
The core value proposition of Rookoo’s digital colleague is minimizing that repetitive work, allowing quotes to be prepared faster and customer queries to be resolved more efficiently. But the newly secured Rookoo funding is earmarked for expansion far beyond simple intake automation.
The Shift from Triage to Strategic Intelligence
The initial success of Rookoo has been in triage and communication management. The next phase, powered by this new capital, involves a significant platform expansion into strategic decision-making tools.
Rookoo plans to develop new modules focusing on price optimization and capacity management. This moves the platform from being a purely administrative relief tool to a core operational intelligence layer. By linking conversation data with planning and internal metrics, the system can offer data-driven insights around conversion rates, team workload, and optimal offering structures.
“By linking conversations with planning and data, we can not only relieve teams but also help them work smarter,” Borloo explained. The goal is to create a learning system that evolves with the company’s needs, providing the data necessary for organizations to plan better and make informed decisions about their resources.
This pivot toward optimization is critical. While automating intake saves time, integrating that data directly into capacity planning—ensuring a venue doesn't overbook or underprice based on real-time demand signals captured through unstructured communication—offers a far greater return on investment for large event organizations.
The founders—Borloo, Anthony Meirlaen, Thibaut Vincent, and Jared Dierickx—bring a strong background in customer interaction and AI technology, having previously worked at Clarabridge and Qualtrics. This expertise is crucial for building systems that can reliably interpret the nuances of human requests, a necessity in the high-stakes, personalized world of event planning.
With customers already established in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the Ghent startup is clearly looking beyond its home market. Rookoo is leveraging the new funding to accelerate its international footprint, starting with an official launch in the Dutch market at EventSummit, the largest trade show for the event industry in the Netherlands.
