Conference software from Weimar.
Focused on the same mission for over 20 years.
Converia is backed by a team that has been supporting conferences since the early 2000s—including academic symposia, association congresses, and multi-day professional events. We have seen over 1,000 conferences a year along the way. This page tells the story of how it all began and who is behind it today.
It started with an Access database that no one understood anymore.
Converia wasn't planned on a drawing board. The impetus came from a former professor of founder Christian Burger. He was facing a task many in academia know well: "I have to organize a conference for 500 people—and revive an Access database because the doctoral student who built it is gone."
Christian Burger and Rainer Kretzer took a closer look at the problem. Emerging from a web agency that built websites at the time, the first version of a conference software was created in collaboration with that initial organizer. They learned from real-world experience where a conference falls apart: between submissions and the program, between registration and invoicing, and between the spreadsheets that no one maintains once the person who created them has left.
This wasn't just a gap in the market identified on a slide. It was a conference that had to work. That very origin still defines Converia today: we build for the reality of conference teams, not for the demo.
Three stages
2000
Founded as a web agency
Christian Burger, a civil engineer with a background in computer science, founds a company in Weimar that initially builds websites. Rainer Kretzer joins the team. A conference project leads to the development of their first conference software.
2009
Converia becomes its own product
The custom project business evolves into a product. Converia gets its name, and the focus shifts to the software. The agency side continues to run in parallel.
2018
Full focus on Converia
The agency division was sold. Since then, the entire team has been working on one thing: conference management software for content-driven professional congresses.
The team behind Converia
At Converia, you won't get stuck in a support queue. Our consulting, support, and project management teams consist of real people you know by name. Here is a look at our team in Weimar:
Our guiding principles
Over the past 20 years, we have learned that conferences are a different discipline than standard events – they require editorial work involving programs, submissions, and reviewers, not just registration and ticketing. This conviction shapes every decision we make in our software. Read more about why we feel this way here.
Interested in helping us build
what has been growing here for 20 years?
