Eventifier, a Bangalore-based startup that aggregates and then creates archives of social media content from conferences, has raised around $500,000 in a seed round from Accel Partners and KAE Capital.
The financing will be used to hire data scientists and beef up the sales and marketing efforts to carve out a position in an already-wide field of event-planning startups that include Eventbrite, Conferize, Epilogger and Doubledutch.
It’s a crowded market, but with nearly 1.8 million events and conferences taking place every year (according to the Convention Industry Council), there is opportunity. And both Eventifier and its investor Accel believe its solution is unique, at least for now.
While Eventbrite and Doubledutch primarily focus on event ticketing and organizing, Eventifier claims that none of them come close to the startup in terms of offering a complete view of pre and post-event data for both organizers and attendees. Eventifier archives all social media data including Facebook posts and Tweets, during and after an event. All this knowledge is then offered as analytical insights about how popular a particular event was, the most talked about sections, discussions etc.
The closest rivals for Eventifier are Epilogger and Conferize that offer similar archiving services.
The startup’s founding team, Jazeel Badur Ferry, Nazim Zeeshan and Mohammed Saud, studied computer science together and graduated in 2010. The trio travelled down south to the Indian city of Chennai in 2012 to attend a hackathon organized by the Startup Center, an incubator.
The core product came out from this hackathon, and since then, Eventifier has signed close to 100 paying customers who are paying an average fee of $200 per event. At the Startup Center run by Vijay Anand, a technology entrepreneur and investor based in Chennai, Eventifier received about $50,000 to build the product, apart from other operational, mentoring help.
“We were quite shy of the idea until June last year when we attended the hackathon at the Startup Center and realized this can be an idea worth pursuing,” Jazeel tells me. He adds that the startup has archived 2,000 events across the world including customers such as Pearson, UBM, Clinton Foundation, Twitter, NASA and the WWW Conference. “This seed round is definitely a great milestone for the Eventifier team. We look forward to building Eventifier into the largest event archiving platform in the world,” says Jazeel.
Accel has to date invested in 17 startups in India at the seed stage from its $150 million+ Accel III fund. Anand Daniel, a principal with Accel Partners in Bangalore, tells me that he is looking to announce more such deals backing startups incubated across several accelerators in India. “Focus areas for these seed investments include big data, Internet, mobile and healthcare startups,” Daniel says.