Galway-based Ex Ordo, an online events platform built for scholarly and professional societies, announced on Wednesday, May 21, that it has secured more than $3M (approximately €2.78M) in a fresh round of funding.
Paul Killoran, founder and CEO of Ex Ordo, says, “This is a major milestone for us on our journey towards scaling our vision.”
“Innovation requires investment, and we have been deliberate in our funding strategy to involve the scholarly industry and its leaders. Over the coming years, we will continue to develop our product and our people with investment from other industry pioneers who also share our vision.”
Investors supporting Ex Ordo
The investment came from Ex Ordo’s initial group of Angel investors, including Enterprise Ireland.
Enterprise Ireland CEO, Leo Clancy, says, “Ex Ordo is an innovative, ambitious company that Enterprise Ireland is proud to back. It is creating a world-renowned brand in its specific area of focus and has a clear growth path for the coming years.”
“This growth will support the creation of high-quality, rewarding careers in the West of Ireland, and Enterprise Ireland looks forward to being with Ex Ordo on this journey,” adds Clancy.
Additionally, the round also saw participation from prominent figures within the scholarly communications industry including Paul Peters (former CEO of Hindawi), Ahmed Hindawi and Nagwa Abdelmottaleb (co-founders of Hindawi), Sven Fund (MD of Reviewer Credits), and James Douglas (MD of Morgan Healey).
Capital utilisation
Ex Ordo says that it will use the funds to further develop its scholarly events platform, build flexible integrations and expand customer-facing teams to support scholarly societies and their events programmes.
Killoran says, “We are delighted to receive this significant investment, which validates the value and opportunity for our scholarly conference platform. I’ve always believed that scholarly events are the true social network of academia.”
“When we bring people together, whether that’s in person or online, we unlock the potential for knowledge. To accelerate knowledge, we need to make it easier for these communities to meet, and Ex Ordo can make this a reality by ensuring that content and event logistics are seamless for organisers and attendees.”
“With this funding, we will be able to accelerate the development of our platform’s capabilities, including the development of a powerful open API, as well as expanding our customer-facing teams in North America, to partner with some of the most prestigious societies on the planet,” says Killoran.
A connected conference management system
Ex Ordo was established in 2011 when student Paul Killoran was given the duty of assisting his supervisor with planning an academic conference. Unable to find any acceptable software to manage the abstract submission and review, Killoran created his own software.
Ex Ordo is a software firm that is specific to scholarly requirements. The platform is used by event planners and association professionals to schedule, organise, and carry out research conferences for their communities.
Currently, the company supports the entire conference lifecycle, from the initial calls for papers and manuscript submission to hosting dynamic events for big numbers of participants, both in person and online. It collaborates with many leading societies to do this.
The platform offers capabilities for organising interactive online and hybrid conferences, navigating challenging review procedures, managing abstract submissions, putting up mobile conference applications, and more.
With the recent hirings of Giuliano Maciocci as Chief Product Officer and Nick Duffield as Lead UX Designer, Ex Ordo has strengthened its product development team. Both individuals have extensive experience creating solutions for academic researchers from their prior employment at the Open Access publisher eLife Sciences.
The company’s most recent announcement was that it appointed Paul Peters as Non-Executive Board Chair. Peters claims to bring experience in scholarly publishing, the creation of online tools and services to support scholarly researchers, and partnership models to work with scholarly societies and other non-profit organisations.
He has previously served as the CEO of the Open Access publisher Hindawi.
