Allseated, a platform that helps event organizers plan and showcase venues virtually, has raised $20 million in a debt round of funding*.
Founded in 2011, Allseated serves a collaborative space-visualization platform that allows venues and planners to create virtual walkthroughs for prospective clients, including tools for building 360-degree views of buildings and designing floor plans.
Allseated design platform. Image Credits: Allseated
The San Francisco-based company raised $15 million in funding last year as it looked to “expand beyond event visualizations into corporate metaverses.” Indeed, Allseated launched a “metaverse for enterprises” last May; however, alongside today’s funding news the company revealed that it’s spinning out its so-called “meetaverse” division into a standalone entity, though it provided no further context on why it’s doing so, who’s heading it up or how it will be funded.
It’s perhaps safe to assume that the metaverse hype-train crash might have something to do with Allseated putting its entire focus back to real-world events. The global pandemic was a boon for virtual events platforms as the world hunkered down behind closed doors, with the likes of London-based Hopin hitting a lofty $5 billion valuation only to flounder as real-world events returned to the fray.
Allseated showcasing venues virtually. Image Credits: Allseated
This reset has been reflected across the startup and venture capital sphere, with the likes of Dice last week announcing it had raised $65 million to expand its event discovery and ticketing platform. Elsewhere, event management software company EventMobi this month acquired Run The World, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed online events platform — a sign, perhaps, that virtual events have more of a complementary role to play in the world of brick-and-mortar meetups.
Allseated’s latest funding round, which takes its total cash raised past the $43 million mark, included investments from Magma Ventures, Level Structured Capital, Vestech Partners, NYFF and WGG, to further scale its space visualization and collaboration platform.
*TechCrunch was originally told that this was an equity round of funding, but since publishing we’ve discovered that it was in fact a debt round. The article has been updated accordingly.