Easol, a London-headquartered booking and payments platform for festival promoters, announced on 28 October 2026 that it has closed a $30M extension to its Series A and is launching Teammates, a set of AI agents built into its platform. Of the total, $20M is equity and $10M is a debt facility from Viola Credit. Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital and Eight Roads supplied the equity. The company says the money funded the build of the agents and will now go into tools meant to turn promoters into AI-native businesses.
Three Teammates ship at launch: an Easol Agent, a Sales Agent and a Support Agent, and customers can build their own. Easol says the work took about two years and draws on ticketing, accommodation, packages, food and drink, guest support and sales data. The agents run inside the platform under its existing single sign-on, SOC 2, audit-log and data-residency controls.
“I believe every experience creator and every promoter needs to be an AI-native business.”
Ben Simpson, Easol co-founder, to Music Business Worldwide · iqmagazine.com ↗
Easol offers two examples of what the agents do. At a ski festival, one spotted hundreds of pass holders who had not booked equipment rental and drafted outreach worth roughly $50,000. Another festival used Teammates to find $28,000 in recoverable payments in seconds, work that had taken two days by hand.
On control, co-founder and CEO Ben Simpson says the decisions in a business stay with the people running it, with the agents surfacing insights, escalating and carrying out tasks. Easol says each customer's data stays separate, recommendations come only from a promoter's own figures, and it has never sold data. Simpson argues that every promoter needs to be an AI-native business, and the company is aiming mainly at smaller and mid-tier promoters.
The announcement also lists new clients: Coachella, Stagecoach, Head Trip, Elements Festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, Boots in the Park and Snowboxx. Four of them are on the roster of Goldenvoice, an AEG Presents subsidiary, and none took part in the beta; Boots in the Park did. Easol already runs the hospitality sites, with pass and hotel bundles, for Coachella, Stagecoach and Camp Flog Gnaw, while standalone passes for Coachella and Camp Flog Gnaw are sold by AEG-owned AXS.
About Easol
Easol is a London-based "experience commerce" platform that lets organisers of festivals, trips and events sell tickets, packages and extras and take payments on one system. It was founded by married couple Ben and Lisa Simpson, who had run events such as the Rise snow and music festival in the French Alps and built the platform they wished they had had; its first version launched in 2017.
This is not Easol's first big raise. It was backed by Y Combinator in 2018 and closed a $4.5M seed round in 2020, when it took the Easol name. A $25M Series A led by Tiger Global followed, announced in December 2021 with Notion Capital, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator and FMZ Ventures taking part. It opened its first US office, in New York, in February 2024, with clients then including Afro Nation, Wanderlust, Rapha and Defected.
Easol says 2.8 million guests have booked experiences through it so far in 2026 across more than 135 countries, though IQ Magazine puts the figure at nearly 3 million. Its original Series A of $25M, led by Tiger Global, was announced in December 2021, and funding now totals $60M including debt. The pitch lands as the UK's Association of Independent Festivals counts 41 festivals cancelled, postponed or ended so far in 2026, after 43 in 2025 and 78 in 2024.
Sources · 2