The London-based platform used by festivals, retreats and venues has raised $30 million in equity and debt, and is rolling out AI agents that work on customers' live booking data.
Image: Rise Festival, a business run by Easol's co-founders. Photo: Easol (press release via PR Newswire).
Easol, a London-based software platform for experience businesses such as festivals, wellness retreats, sports events and entertainment venues, has closed a $30 million (about €26.8 million) Series A extension. The company said the deal brings its total funding to $60 million.
The round combines $20 million in equity with a $10 million debt facility. Y Combinator led the equity portion, according to EU-Startups, with Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital and Eight Roads also taking part. The debt facility was provided by Viola Credit.
From booking software to AI "Teammates"
Alongside the raise, Easol has launched Teammates, an agentic AI product built into its platform. Easol already lets operators run bookings, payments, marketing, customer support and guest data in one system. With Teammates, customers can create their own AI agents for sales, support and operations that draw on that live business data to answer guest queries, update bookings, flag missed revenue and surface insights.
The company gave two examples from early use. In one case, an agent found hundreds of guests holding bookings with no add-ons, around $50,000 of potential revenue, and produced both the customer list and the outreach to pursue it. In another, a business identified $28,000 of recoverable payments in seconds, a task Easol said had previously taken two days.
Easol stresses that the agents run inside its existing platform, behind the same single sign-on, SOC 2 compliance, audit logs and data residency controls customers already use, and says it has never sold customer data.
"We believe the experience businesses that adopt AI will have a competitive advantage that will be transformative," said Ben Simpson, co-founder and chief executive of Easol. He said agents using live data could "operate, analyse, provide insights and take action" across a business while staff focus on customers and on delivering events.
Built by festival organisers
Easol was founded in 2021 by Ben and Lisa Simpson, co-founders of Rise Festival, who say they built the platform after struggling to scale their own events on a patchwork of tools that controlled their data. The company now has offices in London, New York and Los Angeles. It said that so far in 2026 it has powered experiences booked by 2.8 million guests in more than 135 countries, and named new clients including Coachella, Stagecoach, Rapha, Defected and Swingers.
Why it matters
Agentic AI is moving quickly from demos into vertical software, and Easol's launch is an example of a European platform company using its position as the system of record to sell agents that act on real operational data. The pitch rests on ownership: rather than relying on marketplaces and ticketing companies that hold customer relationships, operators keep their data and now get automation on top of it. Whether those agents deliver lasting gains beyond early case studies will be the test for a sector facing what the company calls tighter margins and rising costs.
Sources
- Easol press release via PR Newswire, 28 October 2026
- EU-Startups, 30 October 2026
- IQ Magazine and Pollstar, 28 October 2026
