Company: Easol
Founders: Ben and Lisa Simpson
Website: https://easol.com/
Business: Easol is an all-in-one platform for managing all aspects of your experience business, from bookings to payments and marketing.
About Ben, Lisa and Easol
Easol is an all-in-one platform for managing all aspects of your experience business, from bookings to payments and marketing. The platform is tailor-made by founders who are passionate about events for companies offering experiences across a range of industries such as festivals, holidays, events and retreats.
Co-founders Ben and Lisa set up Easol in 2018 after founding music and snowsports festival Rise and finding themselves frustrated at the number of tools they had to knit together to manage the website, bookings and payments. While the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation across many industries, the technology and software that experience providers have been forced to use until now have remained outdated. Traditional solutions were designed to sell things, not experiences, creating a complicated, inflexible and expensive working environment for providers.
Easol gives experience creators back control of their own business by bringing everything seamlessly onto one platform. Unlike traditional ticketing providers, Easol enables creators to host their website on their own domain, meaning they can manage their customer data and use it to retarget, instead of this valuable data belonging to a third-party ticketing site. It also allows experience creators to offer flexibility in booking and payments through intuitive deposit schemes and payment plans, a necessity in today’s uncertain climate.
Easol recently launched Easol Capital, a new financing solution designed for festival creators. Easol Capital offers fixed-rate loans, unlike traditional financiers which often tie creators into long-term contracts with steep interest rates. Easol is proud to be leading change in the industry by making the financing process fairer and more transparent for event creators.
Easol has picked up $25 million Series A in a funding round led by Tiger Global with investment from Notion Capital, Foundation Capital and Y Combinator. Through no fault of their own, many promising companies found themselves with no revenue as the travel and events industries ground to a halt during the pandemic.
Despite this, Easol has seen strong growth in the past two years, with its customer base now up over 900%. Customers are spread across some 130 countries, including wellness festival Wanderlust, Discovery Channel’s Global Cycling Network and Scottish music and arts festival Otherlands. Easol was recently named one of the top 100 European startups to work for in Otta’s Rocket List 2022, and is continuing to expand its team.
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