A Charlottesville event marketing software company is quietly exiting stealth mode with at least $700,000 in its coffers.
SceneThink, which was founded just this year, has raised at least that much capital in a seed funding round, co-founder and COO Michael Brann confirmed.
The company connects event organizers with community influencers and media organizations to drive attendance, and also helps organizers track and share event calendars. It's led by Brann, who is also director of operations at GreenBlue; Ryan DeRose, who founded digital creative agency Vibethink; and Michael Holroyd, a director at research firm Arqball.
“As an event creator or organizer, there’s ticketing companies, social media and email programs for distributing, but as far as producing an event and distributing across all the channels in the community, it’s a painful process,” Brann said. “When you go in to SceneThink, you enter event data once and its distributed across all event channels – not just social media or arts magazines, but all of them.”
Event creators like theaters, workshops and galleries can submit events to the SceneThink platform, which the software curates and packages for what it calls community influencers – local media, bloggers and community organizations.
Creators can build ads for the events in several formats on SceneThink and choose which channels they should be distributed in. Influencers like local news publications – the company’s main clients – can set preferences on events so only the most relevant are shown. They can take those curated event submissions and embed them on their websites, adding custom headers and tracking clicks as needed.
While at creative agency VibeThink, CEO Ryan DeRose knew event aggregating was one of the big problems it was facing, and built the beginnings of SceneThink as a side project, Brann said.
“Once he did it, the response locally was good, and it has been a series of discoveries since then.”
He said SceneThink now is putting the finishing touches on its event curation platform, taking a last round of feedback from early clients. It’s also working to improve the event submission process for event creators.
The company started in Charlottesville but is expanding its coverage quickly, including to D.C. and Asheville, N.C., then west to Portland and Seattle. Its website says that so far, 15,000 event organizers have created 400,000 events in 11 cities on SceneThink. It’s even delivering a product for three newspapers in Alaska.
Brann said the startup is taking on seed funding in phases, starting with this first $700,000 round:
“Our goal was to raise between $700,000 and $1.5 million. We have three lanes of product development and if we get the $1.5 (million) we can get there the fastest,” he said, adding that it will be actively fundraising for the next few months.
