SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 24, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via PRWEB - Wedding Spot, Inc. , the leading online marketplace to help future brides and grooms search, price, and book wedding venues, today announced it has raised $3.0 million in seed funding to expand its product offering to the broader events market. This round was led by Atlas Venture and KEC Ventures with additional participation from Consumer Internet and Marketplace-focused backers, including Great Oaks Venture Capital, Maiden Lane, Canyon Creek Capital, Erik Blachford (former CEO of Expedia), Eric Liaw (Institutional Venture Partners), Yidrienne Lai, and David Rodnitzky. The new funding will be used to further expand the team and accelerate Wedding Spot's footprint to all 50 states. The company previously raised $250,000 in its first round of funding in December 2013.
Founded by former Venture Capitalist Tina Hoang-To, Wedding Spot has been transforming the venue booking process by providing an intuitive and efficient search platform where users can retrieve instant online price quotes for each of its venues. Newlywed couples spend a tremendous amount of time tracking down wedding information packets and waiting for venues to respond back to them. Wedding Spot's proprietary technology has made it possible to effectively break down event pricing into standardized components and enable users to "build" their own customized event, therefore bringing pricing transparency and efficiency to the wedding industry.
"It's been exciting to see how much we have helped these couples to easily book a venue without all the headache," said Tina Hoang-To, CEO & Co-Founder of Wedding Spot. "However, the most fascinating part of the past few months has been observing users that are starting to use our platform to book venues for other events as well. It's clear to us that this is a natural extension of our product offering."
Wedding Spot has also been an integral part of helping venues grow their events revenue. Most venue event coordinators are inundated with inquires and struggle to find time to qualify each prospect given the limited amount of information that is provided from other lead sources. The typical Wedding Spot user only requests on average between one to two appointments so they have narrowed it down to where they plan to get married. Wedding Spot's venues are seeing conversion rates that are 30x the industry average.
"Wedding Spot has been an amazing partner for us," said Katie Columb from StoneTree Golf Club, a Wedding Spot venue. "In our first few weeks, they sent over eight clients and we were able to book six weddings from those leads. I'm extremely excited about continuing to work with Wedding Spot and using their platform as a way to really grow our weddings and events business."
"The weddings and events industry combined is over $400 billion in spend, and yet there's still so much innovation to be seen in this market," said Ryan Moore, Partner at Atlas Venture. "Wedding Spot has created a simple, elegant platform for venues to generate and manage demand from beginning to end and we look forward to helping them expand nationwide."
Wedding Spot is currently operating in 13 states and has more than 1,000 venues listed. Soon-to-be brides and grooms can use Wedding Spot for free. Venues pay a fee to receive appointments through Wedding Spot, which also provides various management tools for venues including lead qualification and management, appointment scheduling, real-time availability calendar, and other transactional tools as well.
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About Wedding Spot, Inc.
Wedding Spot is the first online marketplace that allows users to search, price, and book thousands of venues. Working directly with venues, Wedding Spot gathers all the information required to allow newly engaged couples to easily search for venues based on budget, location, style, and guest count. Users can "build out" their ideal wedding day by selecting specific services and options to see a price estimate and then book a venue viewing appointment with one click of a button. Wedding Spot's proprietary technology enables wedding venues to manage their entire wedding booking process on its platform, including acquiring customers, organizing content, and marketing inventory. Launched in August 2013, Wedding Spot is based in San Francisco, CA and is backed by leading venture capital investors. For more information, please visit http://www.wedding-spot.com .
PR Contact:
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pr(at)wedding-spot.com
(415) 583-1361
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Wedding Spot, Inc. Tina Hoang +1 415-583-1361
