Easol, a commerce platform for festivals, wellness retreats, sports and location-based entertainment venues, has raised £22.5 million in a Series A extension. The round combines £15 million of equity from Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital and Eight Roads with a £7.5 million debt facility from Viola Credit, taking total funding to £45 million.
Experience businesses often run on a patchwork of ticketing, booking and marketing tools that hold their customer data. Easol lets operators bring that technology in-house, managing bookings, payments, marketing, customer support and guest data through one connected system that they own. Easol has never sold customer data, a contrast with many marketplaces, ticketing companies and booking platforms. So far in 2026 the platform has handled experiences booked by 2.8 million guests in more than 135 countries, and new clients include Coachella, Stagecoach, Rapha, Swingers, Boots in the Park, Defected, State of Play Hospitality and Bingo Loco.
Demand for live experiences remains strong even as operators face tighter margins and rising costs. Live Nation's Return To Real survey found that 93% of fans crave real experiences over digital ones, while 80% would rather spend money on experiences than on things. Ben and Lisa Simpson launched Easol in 2021. The pair co-founded Rise Festival and ran experience businesses serving 2 million guests a year, from the French Alps to the Sahara Desert, before building Easol after struggling to scale on tools that controlled their data.
The funding supports the development of Teammates, a tool that lets Easol customers build their own AI agents inside the platform. The agents work from a business's live data so they can handle support, sales and operations tasks for teams that are often small. One business used its agent to find hundreds of guests holding a booking with no upsells, around £38,000 of revenue opportunity, and the agent produced the customer list and the outreach to go after it. Another found £21,000 of recoverable payments in seconds, a job that had previously taken two days. Teammates agents run behind the same single sign-on, SOC 2 compliance, audit logs, payments compliance and data residency controls that customers already use on Easol.
We built Easol to give experience businesses control over their entire business and bring their technology in-house. AI is now allowing us to do so much more, with rising costs and tighter margins we can now support experience creators in scaling their business growing revenue in ways we couldn't have imagined when we first launched the platform in 2021. We believe the experience businesses that adopt AI will have a competitive advantage that will be transformative. They'll be able to look after every guest like never before, grow bookings with specialist agents working as an extension of their team using their live data to operate, analyse, provide insights and take action across and keep watch over their whole business, while their teams focus on their customer relationships and delivering world class experiences.
I used to spend up to three days building reports to capture every possible scenario. Now, the dashboards give me the information I need instantly.
