Splacer
Splacer, the ‘Airbnb’ of event spaces, is growing an online marketplace for people to list, discover, and book short-term event spaces. This Israeli company is backed by Carmel Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Shlomo Kramer and other leading angel investors.
www.splacer.co
WHY ARE WE INVESTING IN SPLACER?
- The sharing economy has created large opportunities in multiple verticals
- Some types of assets, such as real estate, are better for sharing than others
- Splacer has demonstrated strong early traction
- The team of multi-talented first-time entrepreneurs is backed by well-known VCs and angels
OurCrowd is investing in Splacer, the ‘Airbnb’ of event spaces. The company has created an online marketplace for people to list, discover, and book short-term event spaces. This Israeli company is backed by Carmel Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Shlomo Kramer and other leading angel investors.
4 reason why we are investing in Splacer:
- The sharing economy: Splacer enables property owners to share one of their most expensive, underutilized assets, providing a great opportunity to profit from an already sunk cost. In general, the sharing economy has seen rapid growth in the past decade. Companies like Uber and Airbnb have grown exponentially and VC funding in the space has skyrocketed. Some projections put the sector’s revenues at $335 billion globally by 2025, and the scope for further widening its geographic reach remains huge.
- Some assets are better for sharing than others: Expensive assets that are underutilized are far more appropriate for sharing than inexpensive assets. For a majority of households, the two most expensive assets are real estate and cars, one of the reasons why the most successful companies in the sharing economy have been in cars (Uber) and housing (Airbnb). Splacer’s online marketplace for sharing event space has a number of important characteristics that are vital for success: high fragmentation both on the supply side and on the demand side, strong network effects, and high usage frequency.
- Rapidly growing traction: While still in its early stages, Splacer has seen strong growth since its public launch in July 2015 in Tel Aviv and New York City. 113 events were booked through Splacer in April 2016 alone, while there are over 550 unique properties listed for rent on the platform including studios, rooftops, museums, and galleries. The company had a soft launch in San Francisco in Q1 of this year, and is projecting $3.2M in GMV (gross merchandise value) for all of 2016.
- Team and co-investors: OurCrowd is joining this round led by Carmel Ventures (IronSource, Payoneer, OutBrain) along with Qualcomm Ventures and notable angel investors Shlomo Kramer, Eyal Shaked and others. Splacer was founded by Adi Biran (CEO) and Lihi Grestner (CMO), two architect-turned-entrepreneurs whose expertise in ‘space’ and creativity is proving important for Splacer’s branding and customer experience. Adi and Lihi were joined by Lior Ash (CTO) who brings significant technological expertise and startup experience from his time as CTO-COO of mySupermarket. Maria Molland (COO), who oversees operations and growth in NYC, has over 20 years of experience in the development and management of marketplace, e-commerce and technology businesses from Ebay and Fab.com.