London-based VenueScanner, a SaaS-based venue booking platform, announced that it has raised $1.5M (approx €1.23M) in a fresh round of funding led by Rianta Capital and ACF Investors. The company’s mission is to save you as much time and money as possible so that you can use your energy on creating the perfect event.
Tim Mills, Managing Partner at ACF Investors, says: “With the economy beginning to open up again we are seeing most businesses looking to re-group and re-engage with their employees, something which requires the right spaces in the right places and VenueScanner is perfectly positioned to facilitate this.”
Find and book your event space
Founded in 2015 by Benjy Meyer and Rebecca Kelly, VenueScanner is a venue search and booking platform that helps venue hosts generate more bookings and event organisers find affordable venues.
The company claims it is ‘shaking up the events industry’ by helping undiscovered and independent venues (including schools, churches, warehouses, coffee shops and pubs) reimagine how they use their space. Since its launch in 2016, VenueScanner has listed over 25,000 venues.
Rebecca Kelly, founder & CEO of VenueScanner, explains, “While the last year has taught us that we don’t need to be sitting next to each other to get our work done, it has also taught us how important it is to be together to create, to collaborate and to celebrate.”
“That means we are going to see a sharp rise in demand for locations and experiences that enable businesses to come together for brainstorms, workshops, team away days and more. Our role is to help companies create these in person experiences for their teams and help venues adapt their spaces to accommodate this shift.”
According to Kelly, “The future of event planning and venue booking was always going to be digital, but the pandemic has massively accelerated this. Venues need to be able to offer virtual tours, digital chat functionality, as well as online book and pay to make the process as easy as possible for their customers. We do this for them.”
As a SaaS platform, the company helps organise events for some of the world’s well-known brands, including Facebook, Accenture, PWC, BBC, Google, Cancer Research, NNS, Unilever, BBC, EY, Mastercard, and M&S, among others.
Capital utilisation
The raised capital will help the company for expansion of its services internationally, as well as enhancing its platform to deliver an end-to-end online experience for event planners.
VenueScanner’s lead investor Tom Singh, founder of New Look, says, “VenueScanner’s technology is a game-changer for the future of event booking – it simplifies the entire venue search process and crucially helps venues fill space that would otherwise sit empty. This will be invaluable in helping UK venues recover from the pandemic and as a long-term investor in the company, I see huge potential for massive growth in the next couple of years, particularly in entering new international markets.”
