Beatswitch Wants To Help Festival Organisers Get Organised

So prevalent is the cloud, it’s a wonder there are still industries reliant on pen and paper and Excel spreadsheets to get their day-to-day business done. But, in many industries, that’s still the case. As a result, we’re seeing a plethora of plucky startups set up business to pick off those cloud opportunities one legacy industry at a time.

For example, Freightos is doing it for the rather arcane freight industry. Meanwhile, Estonia’s VitalFields is doing something similar for farm management.

Beatswitch, which, admittedly, is picking what looks like lower-hanging fruit, is applying the same principle to festival management. The Antwerp, Belgium company has closed a €250,000 seed round from Strike4 to further develop its cloud-based platform that lets artists, booking agencies and festival organizers collaborate more efficiently, and to eventually launch across Europe.

Described as a festival planning tool “that becomes intelligent during the festival”, Beatswitch, which is a graduate of local accelerator Idealabs, is another classic example of a cloud service designed to replace the old way of doing business, thanks to the ubiquity of Internet access and mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and in this instance, even Google Glass.

“We track changes in the planning and provide the right information to the right person with the right view,” explains co-founder Thomas Van Orshaegen. “Beatswitch is the digital assistant of the event manager that makes planning more dynamic and can make suggestions on what action to take when the planning is changing during the festival.”

His point being that festivals rely on multiple parties and things inevitably change at the last minute. That’s rock ‘n’ roll, folks.

Or another way of describing Beatswitch might be ‘Basecamp for festival organisers’.

“No more spreadsheets. No more endless printing papers. No more corrupt overwrites on files in Dropbox. No more lost emails. Everything for every festival stakeholder is on one platform to stimulate collaboration and communication,” he adds.

On the startup’s business model, Van Orshaegen says: “We have yearly licensing deals with big festivals. For the smaller festivals we have a SaaS model where they pay a small amount user/month. Because the small festivals of today are the big ones tomorrow.”

Beatswitch counts competitors as Marcato festival, Festival Pro, Festival Systems, and Gigwell.