Ecommerce platform Easol raises £22.5m led by Notion Capital and Tiger Global
This article covers Easol, an ecommerce startup, which has raised £22.5m in a series A funding round to expand its experience commerce platform and launch a new AI product for events, venues and experience businesses. The funding aims to accelerate adoption of Easol’s agentic tool Teammates and support organisers, venues and live-experience operators in monetising bookings, automating sales and retaining guest data.
Easol has raised £22.5m in a series A funding round — £15m of equity and a £7.5m debt facility — to expand its experience commerce platform and roll out a new AI product for events, venues and experience businesses. The London-founded company says the capital will accelerate adoption of its agentic tool, Teammates, which automates sales, recovery and guest support for organisers that want to bring more of their technology and data in-house.
Why it matters
Experience businesses from festivals to wellness retreats and location-based entertainment face rising costs and tight margins while consumer demand for live experiences remains high. Easol’s raise signals continued investor interest in tools that help those operators monetise bookings, retain more customer data and automate repetitive revenue tasks. The funding round also highlights a growing wave of investment in platforms that combine ecommerce, payments and operational tooling with applied AI.
Inside the product
Easol, an ecommerce startup launched in 2021 by festival founders Ben and Lisa Simpson, operates a one-connected system for bookings, payments, marketing, support and guest data. The platform is used across offices in London, New York and Los Angeles and — the company says — powered experiences booked by 2.8 million guests in over 135 countries so far in 2026.
The headline product from this funding is Teammates, an AI-driven agent layer that lives inside the Easol platform and draws on a customer’s live data. Easol positions Teammates as a way for small central teams to capture missed revenue and speed operational tasks: one customer reportedly found about £38k of upsell opportunities flagged by a Teammates agent, while another located £21k of recoverable payments in seconds — work that previously took days.
Easol also emphasises data ownership and compliance as differentiators, saying customers retain control of guest data and that Teammates run inside the platform behind single sign-on, SOCII compliance, audit logs, payments controls and data residency settings.
In the announcement, Eve Szlendak, Head of Sales at State of Play Hospitality UK, said:
I used to spend up to three days building reports to capture every possible scenario. Now, the dashboards give me the information I need instantly.
Who are the investors?
The round combines equity and debt. Equity contributors include Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital and Eight Roads, while Viola Credit provided a £7.5m debt facility. Easol’s disclosure says the company has now raised £45.1m in total to date.
The investor mix pairs US accelerator and later-stage backers with European venture firms. Notion Capital and Eight Roads are established investors in business software in Europe, while Y Combinator and Tiger Global bring a US tech and growth orientation. Viola Credit specialises in lending to fast-growing software and marketplace businesses, which explains the use of a dedicated debt facility alongside new equity.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of ecommerce venture capital firms in the UK
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Ben Simpson, Co-Founder and CEO at Easol, said:
We built Easol to give experience businesses control over their entire business and bring their technology in-house. AI is now allowing us to do so much more, with rising costs and tighter margins we can now support experience creators in scaling their business growing revenue in ways we couldn't have imagined when we first launched the platform in 2021
Simpson frames the product as a way for organisers to treat AI agents as extensions of their teams, using live data to operate, analyse, provide insights and act, while human teams focus on customer relationships and experience delivery.
The bigger picture
The raise comes at a moment when industry research cited by Easol points to strong consumer appetite for live experiences: a Live Nation survey referenced in the announcement found 93% of fans say they crave real experiences over digital ones and 80% would rather spend on experiences than things. For UK and European events, hospitality and leisure operators that adopt tooling to capture bookings, payments and guest data internally may be better positioned to protect margins and scale sustainably.
The deal also reflects broader investor attention to ecommerce platforms that combine domain-specific workflows with AI automation. For UK founders building software for events, entertainment and hospitality, Easol’s extension highlights the appeal of product-led approaches that prioritise data control and operational automation as routes to revenue growth.
They've invested in Easol
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 Y Combinator( ) Y Combinator is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology startup... San Francisco, US  | ||||
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 Foundation Capital( ) | EasolXmos | |||
 FMZ Ventures( ) | ||||
 Notion Capital( ) Notion Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that specialises in softwa... London  | ||||
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