Washington, D.C.-based startup Event Farm has closed a $6.1 million funding round led by Boston-based .406 Ventures. Event Farm is the developer of an event marketing and management platform that helps companies plan and run events. It also arranges partnerships to create high-tech experiences like hologram selfies, virtual golfing and drinks paired with individual music selections.
"The online and offline experiences are what drive results," Event Farm chief marketing officer Alexandra Gibson told DC Inno in an interview. "We can adapt it to any brand but its our software that powers all these activities."
Event Farm has run events for major brands like Google and Facebook, and handled events for a top athletic brand during the Rio Olympics that Gibson couldn't name. In the District, Event Farm may be most well known for running the New Media party during the weekend of the White House Correspondents Dinner. But, the startup also works with plenty of smaller brands, often as a tool to change up the standard kind of sales or marketing conference, Gibson said.
"We answer the question of how to get sales people excited about an event and not just cluster around each other and drink a lot of booze," Gibson said. "Our platform can show opportunities around the room and who they might need to talk to. There's not many [competitors] out there doing that and tying it all together with setting up the event."
.406 Ventures got connected to Event Farm recently after Event Farm bought another event software company called Attend, a startup that .406 had previously invested in. One of the partners from the venture firm will join Event Farm's board. The new investment will go to expanding the client list and working on improving some of the Event Farm technology.
"One of the things we're really working on is a reporting dashboard," Gibson said. "We're pulling in data from SalesForce and other places and integrating it with other systems."
"We answer...how to get sales people excited about an event."
Gibson said the new investment doesn't doesn't mean the company won't be looking for another funding round possibly next year. But the company is certainly not lacking in revenue, currently growing in the triple digits, according to Gibson. The necessary budget clients need to use Event Farm helps with that. The software starts at $5,000 a year and can be much higher depending on the kind of package.
"We have a road map of use cases that we are traveling," Gibson said. "What we're building can be used repeatedly right out of the box and [provide clients] with really memorable events."
