London-based event discovery, ticketing and management startup KweekWeek has closed a seed funding round of $3.25 million (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
KweekWeek is a holistic events platform that connects event organisers and consumers in a single space comprising promotion, ticketing, updates and recommendations. It’s designed as both a one-stop-shop for event organisers and a personal concierge for event attendees. It gives event hosts access to all of the tools they need to manage and promote their event in one place. On the other hand, KweekWeek recommends new events based on location, history, personal preferences and social cues to potential event attendees. In this way, relevant events always find an audience – and vice versa.
The investment for KweekWeek comes from a number of private angel investors with backgrounds in banking, entertainment and technology, taking advantage of the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) tax relief programmes. As more than 150,000 tickets have been sold through KweekWeek since its launch in late 2012, with the site seeing more than 100,000 visitors per month since the beginning of 2014, the investment will be used to continue the development of the KweekWeek product, to grow the company’s technology and sales teams and to initiate its expansion into new markets with a launch in New York & a few European cities planned for the end of the year.
Mehdi Nayebi, CEO and Co-Founder of KweekWeek said: “KweekWeek aims to make event management easier and more efficient for organisers, providing an end-to-end service which they can use to manage and promote their events, as well as maintain a relationship with attendees after the event has taken place. Event attendance is also a very fragmented process from a consumer’s point of view. They have to go to multiple sources to find out about events they are interested in, decide where to buy their ticket from, research the venue – processes that typically involve several disconnected sources. KweekWeek makes it easy for people to get all the information in one place, with their preferences being recorded so they can be alerted to future events they may be interested in.”
Nayebi added: “The company is growing even more quickly than we had expected it to, with more and more event hosts and attendees recognising the benefit of our platform. We’re aiming to break the trend and become an example of a successful UK-based company expanding its platform to other markets including the US. Young companies such as ours based in Europe often struggle to raise significant seed funding rounds, especially when compared to the amount that companies based in the US can raise. For all of the buzz around the London technology scene, there is still a lack of early stage institutional investment here, but these schemes can be of great benefit to startups like ours.”
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