Based: Louisville
Year founded: 2022
Founder(s)/top executives: Eddie Fieldhouse, CEO; Dan Murphy, CSO; David Galownia, CTO
Capital raised to date: $385,000
Key investors: Keyhorse Capital
Number of employees: 1
Brief company description: The Kentucky Hug centralizes available distillery experiences into one holistic marketplace. Consumers easily search dates, plan logistics, manage their trips and book through one marketplace. The platform is supported by a custom booking system for the bourbon industry while solving for its current challenges. This system allows providers and distilleries to centralize data from all points of sale on property into one dashboard. Consumers set up user profiles when booking, opening a direct line of communication between the consumer and provider post-visit.
What are some major milestones in the company’s history? The Kentucky Hug launched its marketplace in August of 2023 and saw a record number of visitors tapping out at over 19,000 by the end of the year. Our marketplace has to date over 250 registered users planning trips for 2024. We also captured 91% of the user data on the customers who visited distilleries in 2023, which far exceeds the benchmark for other systems which tap out around 30%.
What is your company working on right now? We are currently working on setting up contracts for our booking system which went live the week before Thanksgiving. These onboarding conversations have been the focus of the last few weeks and the first quarter of this year. This means onboarding for the back end ticketing system. This will allow our marketplace, which launched in August, to have a more diverse inventory for the start of the tourism season. We are raising capital as we continue to develop the next tranche of features.
What’s on the horizon for your company in 2024? We expect to hit the point of revenue, based on projections in Q3. As always, we will be continuing the further development of tools, reporting and other features to assist in the overall growth of tourism throughout the state. Later this year, we will be rolling out a consumer facing mobile product.
