Eventifier, a Bangalore-based startup that aggregates and then creates archives of social media content from conferences, has raised around $500,000 in a seed round from Accel Partners and KAE Capital.
Founded by three young entrepreneurs (from Mangalore) Jazeel Badur Ferry, Nazim Zeeshan and Mohammed Saud in June 2012, Eventifier is a social media content aggregator tool which automatically brings together all the fragmented audience generated content for an event from around the web. The platform enables event organizers and attendees to get a quick glimpse of all audience generated social media content related to an event.
Eventifier so far has grown to archive more than 2000 events across the world.
“Eventifier is a powerful tool as it aggregates content around an event from different social media including photos, videos, tweets, details of contributors and slides from/on an event, using hash-tags and keyword “, says Jazeel, one among the three founders at Eventifier.. The trio met each other at college while pursuing their Computer Science Engineering degree. After graduating from college in 2010, they decided to take the road less travelled – to become entrepreneurs.
The three founders freelanced as web-developers and focused on attending as many events as possible to learn as much about new technologies, entrepreneurship, marketing and product development. But they realized, as much as they wanted, they could not attend all the events. They spent hours going through digital media to gain knowledge from events they could not attend. Thus was born the idea of collating all social media related to an event – a kind of an event archive.
“There hasn’t been a way for event managers to do it effectively”, says Nazim Zeeshan the technical co-founder of the startup.
The financing will be used to hire data scientists and beef up the sales and marketing efforts to carve out a position in an already-wide field of event-planning startups that include Eventbrite, Conferize, Epilogger and Doubledutch.
It’s a crowded market, but with nearly 1.8 million events and conferences taking place every year (according to the Convention Industry Council), there is opportunity. And both Eventifier and its investor Accel believe its solution is unique, at least for now.
While Eventbrite and Doubledutch primarily focus on event ticketing and organizing, Eventifier claims that none of them come close to the startup in terms of offering a complete view of pre and post-event data for both organizers and attendees. Eventifier archives all social media data including Facebook posts and Tweets, during and after an event. All this knowledge is then offered as analytical insights about how popular a particular event was, the most talked about sections, discussions etc.
How It All Began
They traveled to Chennai, to attend one of the editions of the Idea to Prototype event, In50hrs run by The Startup Centre. There they pitched the event archiving idea – even though it wasn’t the first idea they had in mind. And it found an audience.
The core product came out from this hackathon, and since then, Eventifier has signed close to 100 paying customers who are paying an average fee of $200 per event. At the Startup Center run by Vijay Anand, a technology entrepreneur and investor based in Chennai, Eventifier received about $50,000 to build the product, apart from other operational, mentoring help. The team relocated to Chennai from Mangalore (their home town) and spent the next one-year building Eventifier.
The team though young has managed to acquire and satisfy some of the big names in the corporate and professional conference circuit. They’ve also managed to get marquee clients such as Pearson, UBM Tech, Clinton Foundation, Twitter, NASA and even the likes of the WWW Conference using their service.
Jazeel ends their story saying, “Today marks a great day for us as we close our seed round from Accel Partners and KAE Capital. This definitely is a great milestone for the Eventifier team. We look forward to building Eventifer into the largest event archiving platform in the world – something that makes the life of event organizers, simpler and better!”
