Splash, the event marketing platform based out of New York, has just announced the close of a $7 million Series B funding round led by Ascent Venture Partners, with participation from Spark Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, ScaleUP Ventures, Tumblr founder David Karp, and Vine cofounder Rus Yusupov.
Alongside the investment comes a new business plan for Splash in the enterprise.
Up until now, Splash has been providing users with a freemium suite of tools to help them plan an event. This might be as simple as a birthday party invite using pre-built web page themes, or could be a ticketed event held by a public figure or corporation.
“We have powered events for more than half of the Fortune 500 companies out there,” said founder and CEO Ben Hindman. “These businesses started to demand a lot of our time and energy, treating us like a B2B business.”
And so, Splash is transitioning the company to serve enterprise clients.
The freemium version of the product will continue to exist, but the company won’t be pushing resources in that direction. In other words, it’ll last until it breaks.
Hindman said that the freemium side of the business could have been sustainable if Splash chose to double down there. For example, Splash generated $30 million in revenue from ticketing alone last year.
However, the corporate world is starting to shift their stance on events, seeing them not only as a great marketing tactic but as a potential revenue generator, said Hindman.
Given the landscape and the growing need for an enterprise event marketing automation system, Splash is looking to re-tool the company to take that role in the market.
Hindman said the biggest challenge is helping corporate entities (who have large teams working on a single event) understand the best way to actually throw an event.
At the beginning of this year, Splash had thrown 200,000 events. Today, the company has powered more than 5 million events.
“When you go upstream, you start seeing needs that don’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Hindman. “Our greatest challenge is helping clients make events look and feel awesome, capture valuable data, and get them hip on how to do event marketing.”
This latest round of funding bring’s Splash total funding to $14.5 million.
You can check out Splash for yourself right here.