About Cothena

Create beautiful events worth gathering for.

Cothena helps event teams bring planning, schedules, registration, communication, venues and operations together — so more energy can go into the experience itself.

Where it comes from

Built from real event operations

Cothena grew out of years spent running events where schedules, registration, tasks, guest information and communication all had to work together — but usually lived in separate tools.

We built Cothena around the event itself: one connected structure that can support workshops, recurring programmes, festivals, conferences and international productions alike.

The event may be simple or highly complex. The principle stays the same: keep the moving parts connected, so the team does not have to reconcile them by hand.

Recent work includes Nikon Lenswear's multilingual Moment Maker event in Tokyo —read the case study.

Brand story

About our logo

The Cothena logo began with a simple sketch of a meeting point: different paths converging on one shared place.

Exploring the negative space around that idea created the petal-like form. At the centre, the original meaning remains: a point people move towards together, with a small directional mark pointing the way.

The logo expresses the goal: beautiful events worth gathering for.

Brand story

About the name

The name Cothena brings together two ideas: coordination and Athena.

Coordination reflects the practical work behind every event: bringing people, schedules, places, tasks, bookings and decisions together.

Athena represents wisdom, strategy and knowledge applied with purpose.

That combination reflects something fundamental about how we think event software should work. Cothena helps teams coordinate what is happening now while also planting the seeds for what comes next.

As people plan and run events, the knowledge behind their work stays connected instead of disappearing into spreadsheets, inboxes or individual memory.

Each person contributes to it. Each event adds to it. And the next team or next edition can build on what came before.

The logo expresses the goal: beautiful events worth gathering for.
The name expresses the how: coordination guided by wisdom and purpose.

What we believe

Make better gatherings easier to create

Good event teams should spend more of their time shaping the experience, solving meaningful problems and looking after people — and less time maintaining disconnected tools.

Cothena keeps schedules, tasks, runsheets, bookings, communication and venues connected, giving teams a clearer operational picture and more room to do their best work.

We do not think organisers should have to simplify an ambitious event just because their software cannot keep up. Whether it is an intimate workshop or a multi-day conference, Cothena is built to support the level of coordination the event actually needs.

The software is not the destination. The gathering is.

Who is building it

Experience behind Cothena

Cothena brings together two disciplines that rarely meet in the same event platform: hands-on event operations and the engineering of reliable, deeply connected systems.

Ali Taghavi

Co-founder — Germany

Ali has spent two decades building and running events, workshops and education programmes across Europe. Through SwingStep, he helped grow an international event operation with events of more than 1,200 participants.

Before working in events, Ali conducted pharmaceutical research at TU Darmstadt. That combination of event operations and scientific thinking shaped much of Cothena's approach: understand how the system behaves, capture what works and improve it over time.

James Kibblewhite

Co-founder — United Kingdom

James has spent more than two decades engineering software systems where reliability and coordination matter, including broadcasting infrastructure, real-time media, telecoms, AI-driven music technology and healthcare platforms.

That experience forms much of Cothena's technical foundation: build the underlying system well, keep information connected and design it to remain reliable as the operation grows.

Ali and James began building event technology together in 2023 when they founded MergeLabs GmbH, the company behind Cothena.

For investors

We believe event operations deserve dedicated infrastructure rather than being treated as an extension of ticketing or generic project management.

Cothena is building around that opportunity. We expect to raise our next round towards the end of 2026 and are happy to speak with investors before then.

For developers

Cothena is built primarily in C#, on an architecture designed for deeply connected event data and workflows.

We work remotely, keep process lightweight and give experienced developers significant ownership. If that sounds interesting, we would be happy to show you how the system works.

Want to know more?

Whether you are considering Cothena for an event, curious about what we are building, or simply want to understand the product better, we would be happy to talk.

Book a meeting Read the questions and answers