A new event planning app is here, and it’s telling you to go outside.
Founded by CEO Jocelyne Murphy and CTO Christopher Oka, Toronto-based Wygo has raised nearly $1.6 million in pre-seed funding to help people build communities outside. Similar to platforms like Luma or Eventbrite, but decorated with illustrations of partying stick figures, Wygo allows hosts to create events, court attendees, and charge for tickets and donations.
“Wygo exists to support community builders—with demand for in-person experiences skyrocketing, we’re betting the next wave of entrepreneurs will be the people who build belonging wherever they go,” Murphy wrote in a LinkedIn post.
So far, Wygo has facilitated silly events like The GO OUTSIDE Games, which is described as “The Amazing Race meets Pokemon Go meets City Scavenger Hunt,” as well as workshops for student-led community organization Socratica. As of October, Wygo had sold more than 500 tickets to in-person events on its platform, according to a Substack post by Murphy.
The platform has been a side project of Murphy and Oka’s since 2023, and only recently became a full-time gig when they graduated from the University of Waterloo. The platform aims to be “an economic engine for independent community builders,” targeting an audience that wants to shift their social life offline, Murphy wrote on the Substack.
“I keep hearing myself start stories with the words ‘I saw this [Instagram] reel the other day’ and wishing that those stories were instead about things I had experienced first-hand in the real world,” Murphy said.
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Investors see the value in that vision. Murphy announced Wygo’s pre-seed round in a LinkedIn post last week. Backers include N49P, StandUp Ventures, Garage Capital, Zero 21 Partners, Backbone Angels, Good Future (BetaKit’s majority owner), and Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.
Wygo’s backers also see value in Murphy herself, as a young and experienced community builder who has spent much of her time fostering spaces where people of her generation can feel seen and heard. She is a central figure of the aforementioned Socratica, where she brings people together for co-working sessions just to show off their creations. At 22 years old, Murphy represented Socratica as she spoke to 500 leaders from Canadian tech at the inaugural BetaKit Town Hall in 2024 about the lack of meaningful mentorship for young entrepreneurs.
“What strikes us most about Joss [Murphy] is not the decade of experience, though that is rare,” StandUp Ventures investor Katheleen Eva wrote in her own Substack post. “It’s that she is absolutely incapable of not solving this problem.”
Murphy said in the LinkedIn post that the funding will be used to grow Wygo’s team by hiring a designer, a software engineer, and a multimedia storyteller.
Feature image courtesy Mauricio J Calero for BetaKit.