HeadBox, an online marketplace for booking offsite meeting spaces, has managed to rake in £1.4 million in Series A funding round.
Participants in the round included Sir Brian Williamson CBE, chairman of R.J Fleming, Jeremy Thompson, CEO of Cision, Matt Isaacs, founding partner and executive chairman of Essence, Johan Svanstrom, global president of Hotels.com and Wild Blue Cohort, a network of private Angel investors.
The startup allows users to search, book and pay for creative offsite spaces on its online platform. It basically enables corporate, SME, and private bookers to find and book spaces for occasions like launch events and parties, off-site meetings, workshops or any kind of occasion needing a setting that moves beyond the repertoire of the everyday. When asked to describe the problem the London-based startup solves, Andrew Needham, CEO and founder of HeadBox, said:
The process of trying to book creative, inspiring, off-site spaces is very time consuming and painful. It involves lots of phone calls, emails, filling in forms and contracts and is very paper based.
The firm plans to use the new inflow of funds to accelerate its UK growth. Speaking further, Needham commented,
We aim for HeadBox to be the global go-to platform for bringing people and spaces together all in one place to make brilliant things happen. We want to change the way people think about space, unlocking people’s imagination to the different uses and applications of space and what incredible things can be created, made, experienced and achieved within the right space.
Just last year in 2016, HeadBox also expanded its operations to Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool, and the firm hopes the funding will help jumpstart the platform to new cities elsewhere across the world in the future.
Johan Svanstrom, global president of Hotels.com and new HeadBox investor, said:
HeadBox offers a fast, simple and innovative solution to an age-old problem of finding and booking unique spaces for work related events. It has the potential to be the leading online marketplace for creative and inspiring event spaces – both in the UK and internationally. I can see the platform has the ability to leverage a number of additional revenue streams to those it is already proving. It has extraordinary commercial potential.
