When fans walk into Wembley Stadium or Wimbledon, they see the show - but what they don’t see is everything underneath it: An ‘invisible’ workforce working hard in unison, powering the global experience economy to make sure the event is running seamlessly.
“In order to make an experience… it can be thousands of workers,” Omri Dekalo explained.
The hidden infrastructure behind modern events is a fragmented labor force made up of temporary workers, contractors, and staffing agencies. It spans industries (from sports and concerts to catering, security, and hospitality) and often operates in clear view but with near-total invisibility.
“No one feels it, no one sees it,” Dekalo said. “It just works and it creates amazing moments.” But beneath that seamless experience is a system that, until recently, was anything but that.
Dekalo is the co-founder and CEO of Ubeya, an Israeli B2B SaaS platform positioning itself as an “operating system” for this invisible workforce. With more than 250,000 workers on the platform and clients including Wembley, Wimbledon, and the UEFA Champions League Final, Ubeya sits at the intersection of the gig economy, HR tech, and the multibillion-dollar live events industry.
It’s a space that, until recently, many will recognize as still being managed largely through WhatsApp groups or spreadsheets. Workers would check in via pen and paper, or be reassigned mid-shift with a handwritten note.
The scale of what happens behind the scenes at a major event is something most attendees never consider. A Taylor Swift concert is not a Champions League final - even if they sometimes use the same venue. Each event requires a completely different configuration of workers like caterers, cleaners, security personnel, stagehands, or bar staff.
Many of these workers don’t even work directly for the venue itself.
At Wembley, as at most major stadiums globally, a significant portion of the workforce is sourced through third-party agencies. Before platforms like Ubeya, coordinating all of them would take up space, time, and energy for all involved.
“It’s moments that people like remember for their whole life,” he said, discussing the excitement of attending a live event. “And in order to make it happen, there are a lot of stakeholders… that are doing a lot of work there. It can be thousands of workers that are coming early in the morning.”
Ubeya's platform streamlines that complexity into a single system. Managers can check worker availability, book and approve staff, track time and attendance, and run payroll all from one place.
The platform also tracks which individual is deployed in which area, how much revenue they generated, how well they performed, and where they should be redeployed mid-event. "Suddenly this whole connection between the tech and the real life — that's the magic," Dekalo explained.
An Event Operating System for Post-Pandemic Performances
We are six years since the start of Covid-19, and while there was a dip in live performances for most of that time, the industry is experiencing a surge.
There are currently 500 stadiums under construction in the United States alone, part of a broader shift toward multipurpose venues that can host a football game one weekend and a global concert tour the next. Wembley, for example, now sits at the center of an entire neighborhood: hotels, malls, and restaurants are all built around the stadium as the anchor experience. The workforce required to run that ecosystem is only growing.
Ubeya has scaled roughly ten times in revenue over the past two and a half years, employs more than 50 people, and is operationally breakeven on $13.5 million raised to date, with enough cash for a run rate of 40 years.
“That’s a lot of Taylor Swift,” I said. “That’s a lot of heartbreak.”
