What a week for the virtual events scene. Whole lotta moving parts. First, physical events companies are scurrying to team up with virtual events companies in a tag-team effort to prepare for a hybrid world. Second, virtual events companies have seen an influx of investor cash which means that there’s every reason to believe they’ll continue roaring into the 2020’s.

Here’s the scorecard: 

• Cvent and Encore
  Cvent, a market leader in meeting creation including a virtual meeting platform, and Encore, a leader in events production, joined forces to become a powerhouse in providing end to end digital/physical solutions. The promise is a one-stop shop for both event management technology and onsite production experts, including a single point-of-contact to manage all aspects of the virtual and hybrid event planning process.
• Tarsus and BizBash
  Tarsus Group, a large B2B events and media group, announced the creation of a single media organization for the meetings and events industry. They combined two of their prime assets, BizBash, one of the event industry's leading media companies, with Connect, one of the leading companies in the meetings industry. Together they reach more than 1.5 million meeting and event professionals across North America. 
• MeetingPlay raised an additional $75 million for its hybrid meeting platform that’s used to intertwine physical and virtual events. 
• And rock star Phil Libin (who’ll be speaking at an upcoming VEG meetup this fall) raised more than $35 million for his company mmhmm on the bet that video is far from dead. Mmhmm!
• Twine, a lovely networking app for serendipitous meetings at online events, got an influx of $3.3 million. 
• Brella, a platform for hybrid events, raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Connected Capital. Normally used as an offline networking app, Brella pivoted from live events into a virtual event platform after the pandemic hit. 
• And not to be outdone, Zoom created a $100 million fund to invest in new apps for its platform.
• According to PitchBook, investment in virtual events and video-related startups shot up from $43 million invested in the space in 2019 to over $580 million in 2020. Egads! It's only halfway through 2021, but already $535 million has been invested into the space.

• On Twitter Jason Calcanis @jason sees a new virtual standard emerging for making deals. He calls it ‘Loom-Zoom-room.’ It’s a video reply to a pitch, a video chat to meet the founders, then the signing of a deal in person.
• Spotify launched GreenRoom, the company’s Clubhouse wannabe. It’s a place for a drop-in audio chat. It’ll feature live talk about music, culture and sports. What? No politics? 
• As we emerge like Alice from our pandemic rabbit hole, the New Yorker asks if it’s time for a new tech narrative based not on disrupting, but on building. Worth the read, especially for Valley followers. 
• Niantic announced the private beta of its Niantic Lightship ARDK. It's part of a Herculean effort to make planet-scale AR experiences that include effects like spatial proximity, depth, occlusion, semantic segmentation and meshing to create real-time persistent world maps. Chew on that one if you want to see a collaborative future where real and augmented worlds can mix at scale.
• Unreal showcased how its real-time gaming engine fares in the virtual events world by interviewing Joel Zimmerman (aka deadmau5) as he chain smoked, spewed forth energy and passion, and explored the role real-time technology can play in everything from stage visuals and effects to virtual concerts and a musician’s eventual leap into the Metaverse. Don’t miss it.