Ecommerce Platform Occasion Raises $1.25M To Boost Bookings
Occasion team, with founder Aksh Gupta in center (Credit Occasion)
Occasion
Deal: $1.25 million
Investors: The round was led by Hyde Park Angels. Other investors include Bluestein & Associates, and angel investors Marcin Kleczynski, Malwarebytes founder and CEO, and Patrick Spain, former chairman and CEO of Hoover’s.
What they do: Occasion provides ecommerce calendering solutions to service businesses (essentially any business that sells experiences or classes, such as a cooking school). The startup creates calendar widgets that a business can integrate into their website or social media platform, to enable an efficient way for customers to browse and buy classes: They’ve found their one-step checkout process converts four times better than a traditional shopping cart. Occasion also provides additional services, such as front office (a check-in system for classes) and back office (detailed data on when customers are opening promotional emails and purchasing classes) tools. Next up they’re building a buy button that can integrate with additional platforms, such as Yelp and Foursquare, to create an easier purchasing experience.
Pricing ranges from $59 to $200 per month, depending on the needs of a business. Currently Occasion has 200 paying customers across the US, Europe, UK and Australia.
Founder and CEO Aksh Gupta said millennials have helped drive the need for experience-based ecommerce. “Millennials are becoming the largest segment of the population and millennials love experiences,” he said. “By nature of that, we demand an easy way to purchase these experiences.”
A big part of that is enabling easy ways to shop and purchase via mobile device. “In the past 15 years we have seen how products can be bought and sold online, now we’re seeing how services can be bought and sold online,” he said. “The entire service commerce market is at a pivot point. One year, two years, three years from now there’s not going to be a service that won’t get prebooked and prepaid.”
Other details: Since launching in 2013, Gupta said they’ve maintained a lean staff to validate their business model and get the unit economics of their business right. Now, they’re ready to scale. With the raise, they’re looking to grow to 14 employees (right now they have six employees) by the end of next year. Currently, they’re hiring for an engineering, marketing and sales position.
“What Aksh has been able to do in so little time with a lean team has been nothing short of incredible,” said Jeff Kleban, cofounder and partner at Avocation Investments, Occasion board member and Hyde Park Angels member, in a release. “His biggest strength is how intimate he is with his customers. The product has grown and improved to meet their exact needs, making it extremely sticky and keeping churn at around one percent.”
Twitter @karishustad
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