When Juliana Morais and Raphael Andrade helped friends plan celebrations in Vancouver, they kept running into the same problem: finding the right local people for the right kind of event was harder than it should be.
A wedding, birthday, quinceañera, tea ceremony, sangeet, or sofreh aghd may all fall under the broad category of “event planning,” but the cultural details can make all the difference. Food, music, photography, décor, language, tradition, and lived experience are not small details when someone is trying to bring people together.
That insight led the husband-and-wife team to build Zamala, a Vancouver startup using AI to connect event hosts with local event professionals.
Launched publicly in May, Zamala is designed as a conversational AI event marketplace. Instead of asking users to fill out rigid forms or scroll through endless directories, the platform lets hosts describe what they are planning in natural language. Zamala then matches them with local event professionals whose experience, services, and specialties fit the celebration.
“Our first chapter is deliberately supply-first,” said Morais, co-founder and CEO of Zamala. “Before we push hard on the host side, we’re building a solid base of Event Pros across a good spread of celebration types, so that when hosts arrive, the introductions are real and dense rather than thin.”
That supply-side strategy has already brought the first wave of local event professionals onto the platform. Zamala’s eight categories include photography and videography, catering and food, DJs, bands and entertainment, floral and décor, venues, beauty and style, rentals, and planning and coordination.
For its Vancouver launch, the company has concentrated its outreach on photography and videography, catering and food, DJs, and bands and entertainment.
The host side is also live. People planning events can already use Zamala to describe what they need and receive matches, though the company says it has kept host marketing intentionally light while it strengthens its network of local pros. Morais said one encouraging early signal is that some professionals are already buying credit packs to prepare for incoming host requests.
Zamala’s core differentiator is its focus on cultural context.
According to Morais, the platform can recognize more than 30 distinct cultural celebration types. If a host mentions a sangeet, quinceañera, tea ceremony, or sofreh aghd, Zamala is designed to understand the specific tradition rather than flattening it into a generic “multicultural event.”
On the professional side, event businesses can describe their experience in practical and personal terms: the cultural celebrations they specialize in, the languages they speak, whether they are immigrant-founded, women-owned, or LGBTQ2S+-owned, and whether they offer dietary accommodations such as halal or kosher, or accessibility features.
Zamala then ranks professionals whose declared experience fits what the host needs.
“The design choice I’m proudest of: this is a soft boost, never a filter,” Morais said. “A photographer who hasn’t specialized in South Asian weddings still shows up, just ranked below the ones who have that experience. So cultural depth becomes a genuine advantage for the Pro who has it, without becoming a barrier for someone earlier in their journey.”
For event professionals, Zamala is built around a pay-per-lead model. Local businesses can join without a monthly fee and only pay for the leads they choose to pursue.
Morais and Andrade have lived in Vancouver for years and met through music. Morais sang, Andrade played, and their own experience in Vancouver’s creative and events community helped shape the idea for the company.
The startup has also received early support from several entrepreneurship and cloud programs. Through Alacrity Canada, Zamala was approved for the Canada Digital Adoption Program, which included a grant and mentorship. The company also graduated from Founder Institute in Toronto and Founder University in Silicon Valley, and was accepted into startup programs from Google Cloud, Microsoft, and AWS, which provide cloud credits and mentorship.
Morais clarified that those programs are accelerator, cloud, and adoption programs, not investors.
The name Zamala, according to the company, comes from a mix of languages and cultures with meanings tied to gathering people together to celebrate.
For a startup born from the messy reality of planning culturally meaningful events, that mission is now being tested one Vancouver celebration at a time.
The post Startup Zamala Uses AI to Bring Cultural Context to Event Planning appeared first on Techcouver.com.
Startup Zamala Uses AI to Bring Cultural Context to Event Planning was first posted on July 7, 2026 at 9:00 am.
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