Nigerian event organisation and ticketing startup Festival Coins has raised funding from early-stage VC firm Microtraction as it plans quick growth after exiting beta stage.
Founded by Folayemi Agusto and Nosa Oyegun, Festival Coins is an event technology company that helps event organisers reduce costs, maximise revenues and harness granular data from attendees.
The startup provides tools and services that help event organisers efficiently plan and execute events, with features including online ticketing, access control, cashless payments, and event reporting.
At the time of securing the funding, Festival Coins was working was over 100 event organiser accounts, and had processed around US$10,000 transactions in sales value. It is now planning to speed that growth using Microtraction’s undisclosed investment.
Founded in 2017, early-stage VC firm Microtraction invests up to US$65,000 in startups at the very earliest stage of their development, and has so far backed a host of Nigerian startups, like Accounteer, Riby, Thank U Cash, CowryWise, Wallet.ng, Schoolable, 54gene and Termii, as well as Ghana’s Bit Sika.
Explaining its investment in Festival Coins in a blog post, Microtraction said local event organisers had minimal insights into event attendees’ activities.
“For instance, they cannot accurately determine who attends their events or attendees’ purchasing activities when at the venue. This means a lot of data is left untapped and several monetisation opportunities fall through the cracks,” the company said.
“Global event technology providers, like Eventbrite, have overlooked the continent and local providers lack seamless end-to-end event management services. Also, most local services available involve manual approvals, back and forth emails, or in-person meetings.”
Festival Coins’ DIY event ticketing platform Tix overcomes all these issues, allowing users to create an event and go live in under five minutes.
“We believe there’s an unmet potential for companies and event organizers to leverage Tix to provide the kind of data insights and analytics only seen in online advertising to date. Festival Coins’ access control and cashless payments improve data collection capabilities for live events that allow organizers to boost revenues from sponsorship and attendee spend, as well as provide guest data which will be useful in personalising, customising, and segmenting their audiences to achieve greater ROI,” Microtraction said.
