Easol Just Raised $30M to Put AI Agents Inside Live Events

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-30

Easol, the London-based platform that runs the tech behind live experiences, just closed a $30 million Series A extension. That brings its total raised to $60 million to date. The round breaks down into $20 million in equity and a $10 million debt facility. Y Combinator led the equity side, with Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital, and Eight Roads chipping in. Viola Credit provided the debt. ### Where Easol Came From Ben and Lisa Simpson founded the company in 2021. Before that, they were running Rise Festival, which pulled in two million guests a year across spots ranging from the French Alps to the Sahara Desert. Along the way, they hit a wall. Managing an experience business meant stitching together a pile of disconnected tools that never talked to each other. No single source of truth, no real data ownership. Their fix was an all-in-one platform. Bookings, payments, marketing, customer support, and guest data all live in one connected system. It runs on the client's own domain, and the business keeps full ownership of everything. Easol says it has never sold customer data to third parties. ### The Numbers Behind the Platform Easol now has offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Its clients include Coachella, Stagecoach, Defected, Afronation, Rapha, Swingers, Boots in the Park, Bingo Loco, Snowboxx, and Hijingo, among others. - 2.8 million guests have booked experiences through the platform - Those bookings span more than 135 countries in 2026 alone - The company has raised $60 million total ### Teammates: AI Agents Built Into the Platform The fresh capital went straight into Teammates, Easol's new agentic AI tools built natively inside the platform. Teammates lets experience businesses spin up their own AI agents for sales, support, and operations. These agents work off live business data. They spot missed revenue, answer guest questions, update bookings, and surface insights without anyone lifting a finger. Why does that matter? Most experience businesses run on small central teams, and there's real money slipping through the cracks. In early deployments, one agent apparently found around $50,000 in upsell opportunities from guests who had no add-ons attached to their bookings. It then generated the outreach to chase them down. Another client recovered $28,000 in outstanding payments in seconds. > "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." — Eve Szlendak, Head of Sales, State of Play Hospitality UK ### Why This Matters for the Broader Market Easol has argued from day one that digitizing the experience economy isn't a nice-to-have. It's a commercial necessity. Demand for live and in-person events keeps climbing, and margins are getting tighter. In that environment, AI stops being a buzzword and starts being a competitive edge. It's how a lean team operates, analyzes, and acts across an entire business without hiring an army. "We built Easol to give experience businesses control over their entire business and bring their technology in-house," said Ben Simpson, co-founder and CEO. "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 and growing revenue in ways we couldn't have imagined when we first launched the platform in 2021." For anyone watching the European startup scene, this is one more signal that the intersection of live events and AI is where the smart money is heading.