Goodshuffle Inc., a D.C. company that matches event and party planners with vendors, has closed a $5 million funding round that will infuse it with capital to expand its workforce and build out its evolving fintech platform.
CEO Andrew Garcia, who co-founded the company in 2013 to address the challenges he faced while renting equipment as a DJ in college, told me he will use the proceeds from the Series A to add roughly 15 more people to the company's staff of 24 by the end of the year. He and his co-founder, Erik Dreyer, are looking to hire folks with backgrounds in customer service, engineering, marketing and sales, Garcia said.
Plans also are underway to expand the company's Goodshuffle Pro product offering, a centralized software platform that tracks rental inventory, creates quotes and handles payments for businesses operating in the events space. It also organizes all of the bookkeeping and expense tracking associated with these events and rentals.
"There are some banking-as-a-service products that we are launching," Garcia said. "This is the first time I'm telling somebody about that and the reason why this is important is because if you look at what Brex and Ramp are able to do, that's effectively what we're going to be doing for the events industry." (Brex and Ramp offer business credit cards and cash management accounts for startups for simpler expense tracking and management, among other functions.)
Goodshuffle's primary platform pairs users in need of event-related equipment — think chairs, tables and tents, among hundreds of other item types — with vendors that offer these items for rent. The company makes its money by charging a fee for the service.
Goodshuffle Pro evolved from that business, as Garcia found some clients on both sides of the matching service needed help with their billing and bookkeeping, as well as capital to help grow their businesses. To that end, Goodshuffle has facilitated some $10 million in loans to clients through a partnership with payments processor Stripe Inc.
This evolution explains the interest it's garnered from FINTOP Capital, a Nashville, Tennessee, venture capital firm that invests primarily in fintech startups and led the latest funding round. The $5 million Series A round brings Goodshuffle's lifetime funding to just under $9 million.
The next step for Goodshuffle is refining and expanding the Pro platform so it becomes a sort-of one-stop shop for users. Garcia declined to provide details on what that will entail, but said it would give customers an "easy, automated way" to do things like issue invoices, collect payments and track inventory. "We're super excited about that," he said.
He declined to provide specific revenue figures but said the company has thousands of customers across the country.
Goodshuffle's headquarters is at 1150 18th St. NW and Garcia said most of the company's employees work out of that office. Goodshuffle may or may not need more space when its lease expires in August but, regardless, Garcia said the headquarters would remain in that area of downtown D.C., as it is conveniently located between the Farragut West and Farragut North Metro stations.
