Extasy, the Romanian event tech startup, received €650K in the second round of funding from various local investors. The app is a digital marketing tool that will enable businesses to reach customers and users to attend events. This step values the project at over €6M and raises the seed type investments at almost €1M since the launch in December of 2020.
The startup was founded by Bogdan Buta as CEO and Sveatoslav Veaceslav Vizitiu in the CTO seat. While Bogdan is known for music festivals – UNTOLD and Neversea, Sveatoslav is known in the IT niche as Wello cofounder, a health AI platform supported by the EIT, a body of the European Union.
Extasy was sustained by Early Game Ventures and a series of angel investors. The two co-founders started the project with an initial sum of €500K which was shortly followed by a pre-seed round of €350K back in December.
“Our entrepreneurship culture is still young and developing, but Romanians are for sure doing their best to keep up with well-rounded developed markets with centuries of capitalist experience. And this accelerated globalization has helped a lot in boosting this courage to imagine your business going international right from the start,” concluded Sveatoslav Veaceslav Vizitiu, Extasy co-founder and CTO.
What’s new in the event tech niche
Event technology offers software that can be used before, during, and after a live event. This can translate into event marketing, like ticketing and registration tools; an event platform, which can facilitate networking; and event management, which can take care of logistics, budgeting, and scheduling. Technology can bring evolution and apps offer behavior monitoring, which facilitates feedback and helps improve projects.
The Extasy mobile app offers a series of experiences in Romania and abroad. Among the activities users can book concert tickets, a celebrity lunch, or a luxury date experience, but also skydiving, flying a helicopter, and driving a supercar, to name a few. If the user cannot afford the experience he can apply for a loan on the platform. The company has developed a partnership with a Romanian Bank for the “pay in installments” option.
For users, the app isn’t only for event booking, but also for exchanging gifts, playing games, and winning prizes. Gamification makes it possible to earn coins, compete and access new escapades. The app can also be an opportunity for vendors to digitize their offers. The project provides an automated system for partners to promote their products and increase their revenue.
The digital marketplace is currently available for the iOS system and users can test it by subscribing on the platform’s website. Extasy will be officially available starting with June 2021 in a few Romanian cities.
The event market in 2021
Studies show the new generations, Millennials and Gen Z alike, prefer to spend their money on adventures compared to material things, shared Sveatoslav Vizitiu with The Recursive. He also added: “During this COVID-19 pandemic, we started enjoying nature more, we started exercising more, and we experienced the fun of riding an electric bike through the forest, the fun of doing off-road and all kinds of activities that we never tried before.”
The co-founder explained they aim to become the number one unique experiences provider app in the world. The team wants to reach 100.000 users by the end of 2021, with over 1000 events available on the app, and scale up in 2022 in Europe and the USA. “We also acknowledge the capacity that this app has in building new entrepreneurship ecosystems. It will attract new business around it, dedicated to its services,” shared Sveatoslav.
