From University Frustration to Funded Startup: The 300-Person Ball That Started Everything

There is a particular kind of chaos that only reveals itself at scale. One spreadsheet is manageable. Ten spreadsheets, each maintained by a different committee member, each slightly out of date, each holding some critical piece of information that nobody else has — that is a different beast entirely.

I learned this firsthand during the THS Oscar II Ball at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. And it changed the direction of my life.

The Ball

For anyone outside Sweden, let me set the scene. Student gasques and sittningar are a cornerstone of academic life at Swedish universities, particularly at KTH and the older institutions. A sittning is a formal dinner event — table assignments, a strict program, speeches, songs sung from printed song sheets, toastmasters keeping order, and a tradition of ceremony that goes back generations. A ball takes all of that and scales it up: formalwear, a band, dancing after dinner, the works.

The THS Oscar II Ball was one of the largest events on the KTH calendar. We were expecting over 300 attendees. Students from across different chapters, faculty members, sponsors, guest speakers. A full sit-down dinner in a venue that required table plans submitted weeks in advance, catering orders locked down, and a check-in process that needed to move 300 people through a door without turning into a queue that stretched around the block.

I was one of the organizers. I thought I knew what I was getting into.

I did not.

The Spreadsheet Years

The seating plan alone was a project unto itself. Three hundred people, dozens of dietary restrictions — vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, various allergies — and the social logic of who should sit near whom. Committee members who needed to be accessible during the program. Couples who had bought tickets together. Friends who had specifically requested the same table. People who, for reasons that were sometimes political and sometimes personal, absolutely could not be seated next to each other.

We tracked all of this in Google Sheets. Multiple sheets, cross-referenced by hand. Every time someone updated their dietary preference — and people always update their dietary preferences, always at the last possible moment — someone had to find every cell where that person appeared, update each one, and hope nothing fell through the cracks.

Things fell through the cracks.

The email situation was its own parallel disaster. Sponsor coordination meant a separate chain for each sponsor: what they were getting in terms of recognition, where their logo appeared in the printed program, whether they wanted table placement for their representative, what their representative's dietary needs were. Guest speakers needed travel information, dress code guidance, program details, timing. The venue had questions. The caterer had questions. Every question arrived in someone's personal inbox and sometimes got answered and sometimes got forwarded and sometimes got lost.

On the night of the event, we ran check-in from a printed list and a highlighter. Someone would call out a name, another person would scan down the page, find the entry, and make a mark. When it worked, it worked. When it did not — when someone's name was spelled differently than expected, or when a couple had registered under only one name, or when someone had transferred their ticket and we had not been told — it created a small jam in the flow that rippled backward into the queue.

By the end of the night, the event itself had been beautiful. The hall was full, the speeches landed, the band was excellent, people danced until the venue threw us out. But I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with staying up late. I was exhausted from the administrative friction that had been constant for weeks.

The Question

A few days after the ball, sitting in a KTH common room with coffee going cold next to a laptop, I started asking an obvious question: why was this so hard?

Not the event itself. Events are hard in interesting ways — creative decisions, logistics, human dynamics. That difficulty felt meaningful. What I had just survived felt like the wrong kind of hard. The kind of hard that exists only because the right tool does not exist.

I started talking to organizers from other student chapters. The KTH student union — THS — has dozens of active chapters, each running their own events throughout the year: gasques for new students, farewell dinners for graduating cohorts, chapter anniversary celebrations, collaborative events between chapters. Every single one of them was doing the same thing we had done. Spreadsheets. Email chains. Printed check-in lists.

The conversation kept coming back to the same observation: there was no tool built for this. There were generic ticketing platforms, but they were designed for concerts and public events where the relationship between organizer and attendee is simple and transactional. Student events are not like that. The organizer knows the attendees. The seating matters. The dietary information matters. The program is structured and formal and requires coordination with speakers and performers and sponsors. The check-in needs to be fast and quiet because the event starts at a specific time and the toastmaster is waiting.

Nobody had built this tool. So we decided to build it ourselves.

The First Version

The first version of what became Eventfold was rough and specific. It was designed for KTH student events, by people who had just organized a KTH student event. It handled ticket sales with the information fields that actually mattered — dietary restrictions, table preferences, membership in specific chapters. It generated seating plans automatically, taking constraints as input and producing assignments as output. It let organizers send targeted communications to specific groups of attendees without managing a dozen separate email threads. It made check-in a matter of scanning a phone rather than scanning a printed page.

We called it Tessera, from the Latin for the small tile used as a token or ticket in ancient Rome. It felt right: something small and physical that grants access, that represents belonging.

KTH Innovation, the university's innovation and entrepreneurship support program, helped us turn a student project into something more serious. The guidance there was invaluable — not just in terms of resources, but in terms of asking the right questions. Is this a product? Is there a market? Who else has this problem?

The Pattern

The answer to that last question came quickly, and it came from an unexpected direction.

Students graduate. This is an obvious fact, but its implications for a product built around student events are not immediately obvious. The people who had been organizing gasques and sittningar for four years at KTH went on to jobs — at companies, at nonprofits, at government agencies — and they took their habits with them. They kept organizing events. Office parties, team retreats, company anniversary dinners, conference dinners, charity galas.

And they kept running into the same problems.

The scale was different. The context was different. But the underlying shape of the problem — registration with structured data collection, seating and logistics, stakeholder communication, smooth check-in — was the same. The tools that had failed them as students were still failing them as professionals.

We started getting requests from organizers who had nothing to do with KTH. A corporate events team that had heard about us from a former KTH student in their company. A conference organizing committee that was running a three-day event and needed exactly the kind of structured coordination we had built for formal dinners. A music festival handling VIP guest management.

The platform that had started as a solution to one very specific Swedish student tradition turned out to be a solution to something much more general.

What Eventfold Is Now

The name changed from Tessera to Eventfold as the scope of what we were building became clearer. We were not just digitizing tickets. We were trying to fold the entire complexity of an event into something a single person — or a small team — could actually manage without losing their mind.

The platform today handles events ranging from intimate corporate dinners to large-scale conferences and festivals. The AI capabilities we have built in — more than twenty specialized agents that handle everything from email communications to seating optimization to attendee inquiries — grew directly from the manual work we watched organizers doing over and over again. Every automated workflow in the product exists because a real person was doing that work by hand, and the repetition was both costly and error-prone.

But I still think about that ball. The chaos and the beauty of it coexisting in the same evening. The spreadsheets that almost broke us and the dance floor that made it worth it.

That tension — between the friction of organizing and the joy of a well-executed event — is what Eventfold is built to resolve. Not to remove the human work of bringing people together, but to get the administrative machinery out of the way so that the work that actually matters can happen.

We started at KTH because that is where we were. The problem, it turns out, was everywhere.