Easol, the London-headquartered booking and payments platform used by festival promoters, says it has secured USD $30 million in a Series A extension that includes a $10 million debt facility.
The company says the funding allowed it to develop and launch Teammates, a set of AI agents for festival and experience businesses.
Easol says it has also signed new clients including Coachella, Stagecoach, Head Trip, Elements Festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, Boots in the Park, and Snowboxx.
The $20 million equity portion came from Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital, and Eight Roads, while Viola Credit provided the debt facility.
The new money takes Easol’s total funding, including the debt facility, to $60 million, according to the company.
Easol, which describes itself as an “experience commerce platform,” has offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles.
It puts the number of guests who have booked experiences through its platform so far in 2026 at 2.8 million, across more than 135 countries.
Easol customers can create their own Teammates, which the company says “live and work directly inside the Easol platform, and understand the entirety of a business.”
Its website lists three Teammates: an Easol Agent, a Sales Agent, and a Support Agent.
Easol argues that many festivals operate with small central teams, which leads to missed revenue, and that with Teammates, promoters “can now put their revenue on autopilot.”
In one example cited by Easol, an agent working for a ski festival identified hundreds of pass holders who had not booked equipment rental.
The agent then compiled a list of those guests and prepared outreach to them, targeting an opportunity Easol values at around $50,000 in revenue.
In another example, a festival used Teammates to find $28,000 in recoverable payments within seconds – work that had previously taken two days.
“We built Easol to give Promoters control over their entire business and bring their technology in-house,” said Ben Simpson, Co-Founder and CEO of Easol. “AI is now allowing us to do so much more; with rising costs and tighter margins, we can now support Promoters in scaling their business, growing revenue in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we first launched the platform.”
“AI is now allowing us to do so much more; with rising costs and tighter margins, we can now support Promoters in scaling their business, growing revenue in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we first launched the platform.”
Ben Simpson, Easol
“We believe the experience businesses that adopt AI will have a competitive advantage that will be transformative,” Simpson added. “They’ll be able to look after every guest like never before, grow bookings with specialist agents working as an extension of their team… while their teams focus on their customer relationships and delivering world-class experiences.”
Easol says it was built to let promoters keep full ownership of their business, including their data.
Unlike many traditional marketplaces, ticketing companies, and booking platforms, it adds, Easol has never sold data.
According to Easol, Teammates run inside its existing platform and are covered by the same security and compliance controls as everything else on it, including single sign-on, SOC 2 compliance, audit logs, and data residency settings.
Four of the newly signed festivals – Coachella, Stagecoach, Head Trip, and Camp Flog Gnaw – appear on the festival roster of Goldenvoice, the California promoter that is a subsidiary of AEG Presents.
Easol powers the hospitality sites for Coachella, Stagecoach, and Camp Flog Gnaw, which sell packages bundling festival passes with hotel stays, and told MBW it played a similar role for Head Trip. Standalone festival passes for Coachella and Camp Flog Gnaw are sold through AEG-owned AXS.
Easol says none of the four festivals took part in the Teammates beta, but that touring country music festival Boots in the Park did and now uses the agents.
Head Trip, a one-time, two-night event at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, took place on October 10–11 with acts including Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, and Skrillex.
Easol was co-founded by Lisa Simpson and Ben Simpson, who ran their own events before launching the platform.
Those events included snowsports and music festival Rise and adventure travel series Beyond Adventures, as MBW reported when Easol opened its first US office in New York in February 2024.
At the time, Easol’s clients included festival brand Afro Nation, wellness platform Wanderlust, cycling brand Rapha, and house music label Defected.
Easol’s original Series A round, announced in December 2021, raised $25 million and was led by Tiger Global. Together with a $4.5 million seed round earlier that year, it took the company’s total funding to around $30 million.
Notion Capital, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator, and FMZ Ventures also invested in the Series A. All five, including Tiger Global, have returned for the extension, joined by Eight Roads and, on the debt side, Viola Credit.
Easol says consumer demand for festivals and experiences is rising, even as businesses in those sectors deal with tighter margins and higher costs.
In the UK, the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) has counted 41 festivals that have been canceled, postponed, or brought to an end so far in 2026.
That follows 43 in 2025 and 78 in 2024, which the AIF has described as a record.
“Mostly, we’re seeing very strong demand from audiences, and some record sellouts, but independent festival promoters are seeing their margins become ever thinner, desperately trying to make ends meet while at the same time trying to keep their events as affordable as possible for the general public,” AIF CEO John Rostron said in June.Music Business Worldwide
