Startups

Easol raises $25M for its experiences and event marketing, booking and payments platform

Comment

Image Credits: Easol / Easol founders Lisa & Ben Simpson

The gradual return of tourism and travel in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to see a wave of startups raising rounds of funding to meet new opportunities in the market. In the latest development, Easol, which has built event and experiences software that third-party companies can use to market and sell bookings — it includes a website builder, reservation and booking tools, and payment plug-ins — has picked up $25 million, a Series A that it will be using to continue building out its software stack, with a view to being a one-stop shop for experiences organizers.

“Right now we enable [organizers] to sell events, but we don’t give them distribution,” said CEO Ben Simpson, who co-founded the London-based startup with his wife Lisa. “We see that as a major opportunity, giving creators the chance to get inventory from elsewhere and push theirs out to other places.”

The company has seen some strong growth in the last year, after a period in which Simpson said it had zero revenue due to travel and gathering restrictions in 2020. Since closing a seed round of $4.5 million that year, it has grown the number of organizers (which Easol calls “creators”) tenfold, with the customer base up 913%, transaction numbers up 50x and spend on the platform up by 30x. It has set ambitious targets to treble its growth in 2022.

Its software is used across some 130 countries, although the majority of the consumers engaging in the events themselves are based out of North America and Europe, Simpson said.

Those are scaling and traction numbers that catch the attention of VCs, and this latest round has some of the biggies. Tiger Global is leading the Series A, with participation also from previous backers Notion Capital, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator (Easol was in the S18 batch) and FMZ Ventures — which is led by Michael Zeisser, the former chairman of U.S. investments at Alibaba. (Zeisser is also joining the board.)

Travel and tourism startups definitely shaped up to be some of the biggest pity cases during the pandemic: through no mishandling of their own, some of the most promising founders and companies found themselves suddenly in freefall when their customers — and depending on the business model, the customers of their customers — simply stopped moving around and doing things. That vacuum, however, also led to some very interesting pivots and efforts to find business in completely new places.

Peek, one of Easol’s competitors in the experiences management space, went from focusing mainly on its own experiences marketplace and turned to providing more and better tools and wider guidance to their events management customers. It too recently raised a significant round of $80 million just last month.

While Easol might look quite a lot like Peek on the front end, however, the ethos behind what it’s doing is very different. The Simpsons came to founding the startup having previously been on the event organizing side of the equation, starting and running events like Rise — a massive ski/clubbing/music confab in the French Alps. Ben said that building and running that raised a ton of organizational issues, specifically when it came to IT.

The festival not only sells tickets to events, but it manages lift passes and a range of different accomodation options, as well as a variety of ski experiences and equipment hire. “We had to run the whole thing through five different platforms,” he recalled, “which also meant a number of separate transaction fees. They had all that power on their side.” So they came up with a plan. “What if we build and ran all of that, and didn’t charge ridiculous fees but built it around a subscription model with smaller fees? Then creators could customize the journey end to end, and keep the experience all in one place, and invest in their own growth.” (Currently, the pricing model is based on three tiers depending on the level of service, at £5/month, £54/month or £207/month, offering a variety of different features and a commission scale that changes depending on how much you pay per month.)

All this is sufficiently specialized enough, Lisa added, that they didn’t feel it really existed in the complex way that experience creators needed it to. She said they thus refer to the category with a distinct term: “experience commerce.” They left Rise, which became a customer, with other current users including Wanderlust, Ibiza Rocks, Global Cycle Network, Untravelled Paths and Envision Festival.

The returns are what have made the pitch compelling to these companies: Easol claims that for an event with a $2 million turnover, using Easol’s software instead of a mix of third-party tools works out to more than $80,000 of savings annually.

“Easol’s market-leading platform and industry expertise allows clients to imagine and market unique experiences for consumers,” said Evan Feinberg of Tiger Global in a statement. “In the rapidly expanding experience commerce market, we believe Easol is poised to capture outsized growth, and we are excited to partner with Ben, Lisa and the Easol team.”

More TechCrunch

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

13 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

15 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android