UK travel experiences platform Easol raises $25m in Series A round

Fifth largest Series A ever for a UK-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company

Travel experiences platform Easol has finalised a $25 million series A investment round – the fifth largest ever for a UK-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company.

The round was led by Tiger Global with participation from existing investors Notion Capital, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator and FMZ Ventures.

Michael Zeisser, the former chairman of US investments at Alibaba is also joining the Easol board as part of the deal.

Easol works with the likes of Wanderlust, Ibiza Rocks, Global Cycle Network, Untravelled Paths and Envision Festival unlocking pent-up demand in what it says is a $1 trillion market.

The firm completed a $4.5 million seed investment round in March 2021 and says the latest investment underlines the “enormous potential” in the sector.

Since closing its seed funding, Easol has grown the number of partners it works with by 913%.

Transaction numbers have increased by 50 times and total spend across Easol by over 30 times. It forecast to treble this growth in 2022.

Ben Simpson, co-founder and chief executive of Easol, said: “Lisa and I set out to build Easol in 2017 after years of frustration when running our own experiences.

“We were faced with hacking together so many third party tools whilst trying to successfully operate and grow our business and so we designed Easol as the dream all-in-one platform we would have wanted for our own experience business.

“It’s been a tough two years, however, very inspiring to watch our incredible team pull together in extreme circumstances to support our creators through the hardest time of their businesses to come out of this stronger than ever.

“With this new funding we are excited to expand our team across London HQ, Lisbon and US offices and invest heavily further into building a world-class product with more new and exciting tools to enable experience creators to power their own growth.”

Easol claims to be able to save experience providers 50% on costs by negating the need to stitch together a patchwork of technology systems.

Now a global company, it claims to be powering a “new wave of experience businesses” in over 130 countries and forecasts $200 million of bookings in 2022.

Evan Feinberg, a partner at Tiger Global, said: “Easol’s market-leading platform and industry expertise allows clients to imagine and market unique experiences for consumers.

“In the rapidly expanding experience commerce market, we believe Easol is poised to capture outsized growth, and we are excited to partner with Ben, Lisa and the Easol team.”