How Gothenburg Tech Week Turned a City Summit into a Connected Community

A tech summit is only as valuable as the connections it creates. The talks matter — but the conversations between sessions are where deals, partnerships, and ideas actually take shape. Gothenburg Tech Week used Ventla to give their annual summit the networking infrastructure it needed — helping attendees connect before, during, and after the event.

The situation

Gothenburg Tech Week is one of Sweden's most prominent regional tech events, bringing together startups, scale-ups, investors, corporates, and public-sector innovation leaders for a week of talks, workshops, and networking across the city. The event had grown steadily, attracting a diverse audience that came not just for the content but for the chance to meet the right people.

The problem was that "the chance to meet the right people" was largely left to chance. With hundreds of attendees spread across multiple venues and tracks, it was easy to spend an entire day at the event and miss the person you most needed to meet. The programme was strong, but the connective tissue between sessions — the part that turns a conference into a community — was underdeveloped.

The organizers knew that if they could make networking more intentional and less accidental, the event would deliver significantly more value to every attendee segment: founders looking for investors, corporates scouting startups, and talent looking for opportunities.

What they needed

For a multi-venue city summit built around connections, Gothenburg Tech Week needed:

A way for attendees to discover and connect with each other before the event started, based on interests, industry, and goals
A shared platform that worked across all venues and tracks, giving the fragmented event a single digital home
Session scheduling tools so attendees could build personalised agendas across the week's programme
Real-time updates for venue changes, speaker additions, and schedule adjustments
Post-event access to contacts and content so the connections made during the week could continue developing

How they used Ventla

The Participant Directory became the centrepiece of the digital experience. Attendees could browse profiles, filter by industry or role, and send messages before the event — turning the first day from cold introductions into warm follow-ups on conversations already started. For a tech summit where the audience ranges from solo founders to corporate innovation directors, this levelled the playing field.

The multi-track programme was managed through Ventla's scheduling tools. Attendees built their own agendas from the available sessions, workshops, and networking slots. Because the event spanned multiple venues across Gothenburg, each session included location details and maps — reducing the logistical confusion that multi-site events typically generate.

Push notifications handled the real-time coordination that a city-wide event demands. When a popular session moved to a larger venue, or when a last-minute speaker was added, attendees knew immediately. The organizers could segment notifications by track or interest area, so attendees only received updates relevant to their personalised agenda.

After the event, the platform remained accessible. Contact information, session recordings, and presentation materials were available on-demand — giving the week's connections a foundation to build on rather than leaving them dependent on exchanged business cards.

What happened

Networking activity through the platform exceeded the organizers' expectations. A significant proportion of attendees engaged with the participant directory before the event, and in-app messaging was active throughout the week. The feedback consistently highlighted that the ability to identify and connect with relevant people — before arriving — changed the nature of the event experience.

The multi-venue logistics, which had been a pain point in previous years, ran more smoothly. Attendees navigated between sites with less confusion, and real-time notifications kept the programme feeling coordinated even when spread across the city.

Post-event surveys showed that attendees rated networking as the most valuable aspect of the week — and for the first time, that networking was described as intentional rather than serendipitous. The connections people made were the ones they wanted to make, not just the ones that happened by proximity.

What this means for similar organizations

Gothenburg Tech Week's experience is relevant for any event where the audience is diverse, the programme is distributed, and the value proposition is as much about who you meet as what you hear. Industry summits, startup festivals, multi-day conferences, and city-wide innovation weeks all face the same challenge: lots of the right people in the same place, with no reliable way to connect them.

The practical takeaway is that networking doesn't scale through goodwill alone. If your event brings together people who should be meeting each other, you need infrastructure that makes those meetings happen — not just a name badge and a coffee break.

Industry: Technology · Event type: City Tech Summit · Attendees: Hundreds across multiple venues · Region: Sweden

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