Hyve Group, which is itself currently being acquired by Hellman & Friedman private equity, has bought the three-year-old LegalTechTalk event for an estimated £27-28mn (9x EBITDA) upfront. It is believed the founders of the London-based company are also on a 3-4 year earn-out, particularly linked to their US launch plans from 2027. The total deal price is expected to be some £45mn by 2030.
The deal, completed last week, again highlights the emergence of new-wave, festival-like confexes disrupting some areas of traditional trade show business but also the appetite of organizers to acquire a self-funded startup whose third event (the second profitable one) took place only last month.
It’s just over a year since Emerald, in the US, paid £20mn upfront (8x EBITDA) for InsurTech Insights, the then seven-year-old event organizer. That deal came just as two former InsurTech employees were preparing to organize their own profitable, second LegalTechTalk. Bradley Collins and Mikkel Jensen had worked together at InsurTech Insights since the start: “We built InsurTech from the ground up. They are now the biggest insurance events in Europe and Asia, and the second biggest show in America. We learned a tremendous amount there. It’s a very entrepreneurial and hard working place, but they/we also made some mistakes along the way, which we learned from and can avoid.”
After the US InsurTech event in 2022, the two friends decided to start their own version of InsurTech in another, as yet unidentified, industry vertical undergoing similar tech transformation. Collins told Flashes & Flames in 2025 that the only sector they could indentify that was slower than insurance in being transformed by tech was the legal industry: “If you look at every other industry sector. In Fintech, you have Monzo and Revolut competing with the big banks. In retail, Amazon changed the whole business model and the business model of insurance has changed. Every industry has had this seismic shift. But the legal industry is still all about documents, paper and filing cabinets. It’s gone into computers now, which was a massive change. But it’s not really changed much when you think about what’s happened in other industries… there’s been over a billion invested into legal tech startups this year, which is crazy. And there wasn’t a big event in legal compared with the other sectors.”
He had added: “There’s not the equivalent of Cannes Lions, Money 20/20, or ShopTalk, at least not in Europe. We thought we could create that. Then ChatGPT happened and AI became big. And now you don’t need paralegals anymore really because AI can do a lot of that work. The industry is starting to go through this huge change and we are positioning ourselves in the centre of that. We aim to be the biggest catalyst for innovation in the space. That’s what we’re doing. That’s our mission.”
That was the start of LegalTechTalk which launched in London in 2024 as a festival with high-quality food and drinks, boat parties, music, dancers, entertainment and fun – a blurring between business and pleasure for a new generation of professionals that has characterized so many of the new-wave events.
The startup was funded by £100k from friends and family, which covered the venue deposit; all other expenses were met by advance payments from sponsorship and visitor tickets. The first event took place in June 2024. The £1mn revenue, a mere £100k development loss and 2,500 visitors (55% from the UK) achieved by a team of six (including the founders), tells the story of a project that quickly found its market.
Although it is unmistakeably an events company, LegalTechTalk has always maintained a year-round relationship with visitors and sponsors including twice-monthly webinars and round tables, bi-monthly dinners, research reports, newsletter and monthly digital magazine”.
This year’s LegalTechTalk again took place in June at the InterContinental Hotel, near London’s Thames-side O2 venue. It had 400+ speakers and 5,500 attendees from 2,400 companies and 75 countries, and more than 20,000 meetings. It was the breakthrough year for the founders, with revenue more than doubled, EBITDA x4 and a profit margin of 45%. It was different in other ways because – having started the process of selling the company (albeit informally without an Information Memorandum) more than eight months previously – completion of the Hyve deal awaited the results of the 2026 event. The acquisition completed two weeks later.
For Collins and Jensen, it was a dream deal: Hyve had been their preferred buyer from the start – and proved also to be the highest bidder. There were certainly some would-be buyers they didn’t want to work with.
Collins says: “We had one potential buyer who runs trade shows and came to our event in year one. We were invited to one of its events, and it just wasn’t for us. It was stale and you had to pay for coffee,and the potential buyer, said, ‘oh, you know, if you give away coffee, that’s going to eat into profit’. If I bought you, we would also charge for coffee’. And I thought ‘You’re not our buyer. This is not what we’re going to do. This isn’t the legacy we’re going to leave for the legal industry’. People love coming to LegalTechTalk because they’re taken care of. Everything is provided. You get your hair cut, you get your nails done, there’s music, you can get a back massage. You’ve got content that appeals to every single professional at every single level across every single job in the profession.”
The LegalTechTalk founders had first met Hyve CEO Mark Shashoua, months before their first event in 2024. They visied his GroceryShop that year and Hlth in 2025 “and the Hyve people gave some very good game-changing advice quite early on, including recommending their rebooking company”. Hyve also introduced Collins and Jensen to event entrepreneurs Jay Weintraub and Jonathan Weiner: “We modeled our event on some of theirs. The majority of shows we looked up to were (and are) from Hyve.”
The LegalTechTalk acquisition follows a trend of established organizers buying new-wave event startups. It may have started with Money 20/20, acquired by Ascential and now part of Informa alongside the ultimate B2B festival event, Cannes Lions. But the transformation of Hyve – from the former ITE’s role as a traditional trade show organizer in emerging markets – has been accelerated by a hyperactive acquisition strategy including many new-style events: ShopTalk and GroceryShop (2019), Retail Meetup (2020), Fintech Meetup (2022), HLTH (2024), POSSIBLE (2024), Healthcare Growth Advisory Network, ASU+GSV Summit, Behavioral Health Tech, Manifest (2025) and Virtuosi League (2026).
Smart acquisitions on both sides of the Atlantic and a strong data-led strategy helped Hyve Group to attract last month’s $1.8bn agreed offer from Hellman & Friedman, a new investor in the events industry.
CEO Shashoua told Flashes & Flames’ Monetising B2B conference in London, this year: “Events like Money20/20 changed how people thought about exhibitions. They weren’t simply conferences or trade fairs anymore. They became ecosystems.” He said Hyve had had more than doubled its annual revenue to some $450mn since 2019, “with significant double-digit organic growth across the portfolio.”
Some of Hyve’s future growth will come from LegalTechTalk which is increasing its London venue capacity by almost 50% in 2027, with the addition of an adjacent building (described by Collins as “a rave venue”). According to Jensen, that means “more stages, more exhibition, more bars and all the fun stuff we like to do” and an even larger after-party. The growth prospects are under-pinned by six “Diamond” sponsors each paying £500k. It presumably will boost the sponsor revenue which, in 2026 had totalled more than £5.5mn.
But the three-year ambitions of the LegalTechTalk founders and the new owner are focused on the US market where its new show launches at Fontainebleau Miami Beach, in December 2027. Collins says: “The opportunity to bring LegalTechTalk to North America allows us to connect communities across continents, create new opportunities for collaboration and build a truly global platform for legal transformation. It has the potential to be twice the size of the London event. The market is 10 times the size, but we’re going to start with 3,000 people, making sure we get the right people in the room rather than trying to get 10,000 attendees in year one.”
Beyond their earn-out with Hyve, you suspect that Collins and Jensen have other ideas for B2B festivals beyond the legal market. LegalTechTalk might just be the start.
| SnapShot LegalTechTalk | |||
| £mn | 2026* | 2025* | 2024 |
| Revenue | 6.8 | 2.9 | 1.0 |
| Sponsors | 85% | 85% | 84% |
| Visitors | 15% | 15% | 16% |
| EBITDA | 3.1 | 0.7 | (0.1) |
| Margin | 45% | 24% | — |
| Visitors | 5.5k | 4.0k | 2.5k |
| Headcount | 18 | 10 | 6 |
