If you’ve ever planned a wedding or a big party, you know that finding and booking a venue is one of the biggest headaches of the process. First you have to find places that fit your requirements, then you have to reach out individually to each one to learn about pricing and, the key thing, availability. The whole thing takes a lot of time and leads to a lot of dead ends, and it’s a big reason why people hire expensive party planners.
Enter a new startup called Eventup. Eventup, which launched to the public Tuesday out of Los Angeles-based technology studio Science Inc., is an online marketplace which lets commercial and private property owners list their properties, and consumers search for them by date, price, and purpose. Eventup also manages all the financial transactions related to booking, and provides customer support on both sides of the transaction.
At launch, the site is populated with listings from the L.A. area including the houses from HBO’s Entourage and CBS’s Big Brother set, and the former homes of Eric Clapton and Jim Morrison. Going forward, property owners from anywhere can list their venues on Eventup, and the site plans to roll out dedicated sections of the site for more cities in the weeks and months ahead.
“We’ll list everything from a privately owned Hollywood loft for a small dinner party, to larger mansions, to the Pasadena convention center for a corporate event,” Eventup co-founder Tony Adam said in an interview. He explained the difference between Eventup and existing sites like this: “With Craigslist, you have to go in and look at hundreds of listings just to find the one that you want, and contact each place individually. With Airbnb, we share the same type of searching and booking platform, but we’re not booking room rentals. We’re in the event space business.”
In all, it seems like a solid idea to me, and the fact that the platform is launching with some seriously attractive properties could give it nice traction right out the gate. The key thing will be how quickly Eventup grows beyond its homebase of Los Angeles — in web startups, of course, scaling is everything. It’ll definitely be one to watch in the months ahead.
Eventup was built by a team of 10 people in LA’s Science Inc., the L.A. technology studio backed by investors including Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, The Social+Capital Partnership, Tomorrow Ventures, Siemer Ventures, Philippe Camus, Jean-Marie Messier, Jonathan Miller and Dennis Phelps.
