Cloud-based event automation platform Attendease has raised a seed round led by 500 Startups Canada. The round also includes participation from Conconi Growth Partners and 7Gate Ventures.
Attendease’s platform is targeted to corporate event teams for the planning and execution of events. The company says that over 60 percent of event planners rely on seven or more tools to plan a single event, and the market is dominated by event management tools with narrow functionality.
“The space is fragmented, first of all, because there are many components involved in putting on events. There are also many sub-segments, each with different requirements. For example, music festivals have very different requirements for ticketing than a corporate event,” said Todd Heintz, president and CEO of Attendease. “Like many markets such as the sales automation or marketing automation spaces, there are also many ‘feature-apps’ or web tools solving a very targeted pain point. Over time there is industry consolidation.”
The company plans to use the funding to accelerate customer growth, with a focus on its mid-market and enterprise customer base.
“Attendease is operating in a large, established market that is undergoing structural change. The company has deep domain knowledge, a strong team, and is approaching the problem in a unique way that we see as opportunistic in solving the pain of corporate event teams who need scalability and repeatability in their event planning cycles,” said Patrick Lor, managing partner of 500 Startups Canada. “We look forward to working with the Attendease team to build a world-class EventTech company.”
Attendease was founded as a custom web technology business in 2001, though Heintz said they quickly turned their focus on event registration and website development for mid-sized and large technology companies for events. As they did more custom technology consulting for clients, they realized they needed their own platform to automate tasks, and this evolved into Attendease’s platform today.