Richmond startup OccasionGenius has closed its seed round with $2.15 million in fresh funding.
The company’s platform, used by hotels and other hospitality providers, coalesces event data and informs people of things to do around town.
The seed funding, confirmed by founder Nate Marcus, was led by Richmond's CVA Angels with an $800,000 investment and included participation from Virginia Beach-based 757 Angels, among others. Marcus said in an email that the new capital would allow OccasionGenius to focus on accelerating B2B contracts.
Inno first reported on the round in January, at which point OccasionGenius had hauled in $1 million in equity funding. It follows a pair of angel investment rounds in 2017 and 2018 that totaled $1.1 million, bringing its total raised to about $3.3 million.
The startup was founded in 2015 as PartyRVA, a private event marketplace, but after going through the Lighthouse Labs accelerator it pivoted toward white-labeled tech for enterprise customers in the travel industry.
The platform pulls in public data from large event-booking sites like Eventbrite and TicketMaster and regional web calendars of local organizations like Startup Virginia and VCU and feeds it through its patent-pending system to personalize it for clients.
In its first year, the company brought in $58,000 and helped 80,000 people find events from children’s to bachelor parties. It entered Lighthouse Labs and emerged as OccasionGenius, then in 2017 went into stealth mode to develop its AI-based event discovery technology. It sold the event marketplace side of the business in late 2018 to Mike Murphy, Mark Jones, Joe Doran and Nick Jones, who are operating it as EventZingo.
New features on the platform, Marcus said, include "event intelligence" – automated software for de-duping events, filtering out "trash" or "non-social" events, updating and classifying events in real time and estimating popularity. Another is "manual enhancement," where local experts make sure the most popular events are well presented online.
He said the startup has doubled its workforce in the last year, to 18 employees with two more joining in April.
