An ‘experience commerce’ platform has raised £19 million in the fifth largest Series A raise for a UK-based SaaS company.
Easol, founded by Ben and Lisa Simpson, says it is powering a new wave of experience businesses in more than 130 countries.
Ranging from large multinationals to independent creators building businesses from their passions, current customers include Wanderlust, Ibiza Rocks, Global Cycle Network, Untravelled Paths and Envision Festival.
The new funding comes from Tiger Global with participation from existing investors Notion Capital, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator and FMZ Ventures led by Michael Zeisser, the former chairman of US investments at Alibaba, who is also joining the board.
The firm says the new investment indicates the enormous potential of Easol to unlock the significant pent up demand for the experience and travel market that is set to rebuild in 2022.
Since closing a $4.5m seed funding round in March, Easol has increased the number of creators it works with by 10 times, growing the customer base by 913%.
Look after your customers – they are the people at the coalface
“Lisa and I set out to build Easol in 2017 after years of frustration when running our own experiences,” said co-founder and CEO Ben Simpson.
“We were faced with hacking together so many third-party tools whilst trying to successfully operate and grow our business and so we designed Easol as the dream all-in-one platform we would have wanted for our own experience business.
“It’s been a tough two years; however, it is very inspiring to watch our incredible team pull together in extreme circumstances to support our creators through the hardest time of their businesses to come out of this stronger than ever.
“With this new funding we are excited to expand our team across London HQ, Lisbon and US offices and invest heavily further into building a world-class product with more new and exciting tools to enable experience creators to power their own growth.”