On Super Bowl night, an opportunity arrived: could Evential deploy at the INtercollegiate Entrepreneurship Summit on February 27? The event was 19 days away. The team took the prototype to 16 Tech in Indianapolis and put it to work at a real event.
What the first deployment showed
The gap between registration and attendance was 39%. Attendees traveled an average of 50.4 miles, compared with 61.8 miles for people who did not attend. That was an early observation worth exploring, rather than a forecast of who would show up next time.
At the end of the event, 59 meals remained untouched: $507 in catering spend. These were concrete examples of the uncertainty organizers face when planning against registration counts alone.
A small badge, a bigger ambition
The deployment used discreet smart badges without asking attendees to download an app. It gave the team a first view of how measurement could fit into an event’s existing flow.
We don’t want to be known as the guys who make smart badges. We want to be the world’s first real-time Event Intelligence platform — the all-in-one assistant to event organizers, eliminating uncertainty as events evolve.
Rohan Tyagi and Rithul Saravanakumar, February 2026
Building the next version
Rohan Tyagi, Rithul Saravanakumar, and Samarth Das helped make this first deployment possible. The February update also outlined plans for private connectivity, tamper-resistant hardware, and a live dashboard, alongside the search for founding engineers and pilot partners.
The first deployment was a starting point: move from a working prototype to evidence an organizer could actually use.