His 15th high school reunion should have been a boastfest. Reggie Aggarwal had been class president and had gone on to become a lawyer and a hotshot entrepreneur. Instead, he had to admit to old acquaintances that his company was a joke in the industry–and that he was broke, owed money to investors and had moved back in with his parents. “I was kind of the Indian George Costanza,” he says.

Eleven years on it’s a different story. Cvent, the McLean, Va. event registration and management company Aggarwal launched in 1999, has roared back from the dead. Last August it went public on the NYSE, raising $117 million; its recent market cap was nearly $1.6 billion. Over the most recent four quarters the company lost $1.3 million on $104 million in revenue. Customers like Wal-Mart, Siemens and WellPoint WLP -1.8% use the cloud-based platform to search, field bids, book reservations and register attendees for more than 200,000 venues in 90 countries. The platform is free; registration costs a small fee. Cvent’s mobile app for managing and navigating conferences runs from $6,000 to $10,000. It also charges venues to advertise on the platform’s search pages.

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