Booking the right venue for an event can be tough. Researching availability, location and offerings is often just the start, and matching the room's aesthetics to the occasion is also important, especially when dealing with major life events.
Now, using more than 130 of Rhode Island's unique venues, local founder Nick Cianfaglione is getting ready to launch Restaurent, an “open-table” of private events.
Cianfaglione, who previously founded and sold VC Social and Artist Republik, said his Restaurent will make finding the “perfect venue for any event” a breeze. During a recent trip to SXSW, Cianfaglione announced that he had secured $1.5 million in funding for the new startup.
From the investment side, all of the company's major stakeholders are RI based investors, he told RI Inno this week.
“I want this platform to be built by Rhode Island, for Rhode Island, in Rhode Island. The first step to do this was to show the world that you can raise money here and even though we are the smallest state we still have major deal flow and investment opportunities," Cianfaglione said. “We have had nothing but an amazing initial response with over 130-plus local venues expressing interest in being a part of our community in addition to major community organizations, and hospitality leaders. The support has been tremendous and I don’t know a better place to launch our platform for the first time.”
Cianfaglione said he's been sitting on the idea for a while. It was initially inspired after helping his family plan funeral receptions.
"In helping them, I realized that people ended up just booking the first restaurant that got back to them, rather than maybe the best choice. After that I started paying attention to the entire event booking space and realized it wasn't just funeral receptions but rather the entire event booking process is fragmented and broken," he said.
Over the last year, Cianfaglione said he took the time to dig deep into competitive analysis of the market and chat with hundreds of restaurant owners & breweries to define the revenue model before moving to the front end development.
"The time table for this was slightly longer because I wanted to make sure we really had something that could be a billion-dollar business," he said. "That included designing the website, testing the website with a small group of early testers, getting our first couple bookings, and then starting talking to investors."
In addition to helping customers easily sift through nearby venues, Cianfaglione sees this massively increasing revenue for the businesses that sign up for the platform.
"We will do everything in our power to support bringing them bookings and all they have to do is sign up," he said. As for customers, this is going to completely change the way they book private events, in a good way! We believe people should be able to book more than a table at their favorite restaurants, bars, breweries, and beyond. This enables them to do that!"
