Lagos-based online events venue booking platform, ogaVenue has secured a $45,000 seed investment from Spark and Hotels.ng.
ogaVenue launched in 2014 and it contains a comprehensive database of event venues in Nigeria. There are currently over 2000 venues spread across 17 states in Nigeria listed on the site with reviews from other users. Each venue listing contains detailed information including availability, location, capacity, facilities, costings, images (including a 360° vrtual tour) and policies.
Talking about the raise, ogaVenue CEO, Andrew Airelobhegbe says, “We are incredibly excited to join the Spark family as it houses some of the most successful startups in Nigeria and arguably as helped to grow the most successful founders in Nigeria. We’re also thrilled to have attracted the attention of, and investment from Hotels.ng, a pioneering travel business we have long since admired and followed. With them on board, we are certain that together, we will radically change the face of events and hospitality in Nigeria and Africa.”
Spark co-founder, Jason Njoku already published a post talking about Spark’s new agenda where he announced this new investment. He didn’t mention any names but he did say he was optimistic about it and his fellow co-founder, Bastian Gotter agrees.
In Bastian’s words, “The OgaVenue venue team combined their strong technical backgrounds with a high sense of commerciality and quickly established industry leadership in the venue booking space. We believe this investment is complementary to our earlier investments in Hotels.ng and are very happy to partner with them in supporting OgaVenue with capital and advice. We hope OgaVenue will continue to expand its industry leadership and win big”.
Hotels.ng founder and CEO Mark Essien added that, “For us, the ogaVenue deal was a no-brainer. Andrew is probably the smartest young entrepreneur in the Eco-system, and he has built a business that’s showing amazing numbers and traction. Seeing how closely his business is related to ours, it was obvious that getting involved in this deal would be to both of our advantages – there are clear synergies that can be leveraged on to accelerate growth in both the hotel and the event segments”.
ogaVenue is hoping to use this investment to increase their inventory and expand to more states across Nigeria. They’re also going to build their product, engineering and business development teams.
