Goodshuffle, building software for the event rental and production industry, raised $5 million in a round of Series A funding from FINTOP Capital.
The global pandemic “wiped out much of the events industry,” CEO Andrew Garcia told TechCrunch. However, Goodshuffle’s user base — made up of small companies that rent out items like tables, chairs, tents, decorations and linens — ended up being “extremely resilient.”
“A lot of them were able to stay alive and keep providing that temporary infrastructure for COVID testing sites, for example,” Garcia said. “And if events were still going to happen, they needed to be outside, so some of them even spun up side businesses with manufacturing and renting out personal protective equipment.”
Goodshuffle had also just deployed what Garcia called a “wishlist integratio ,” which was similar to a Shopify plug-in that enabled businesses to connect their inventory and offerings to their website like a virtual showroom. Clients could browse inventory, add items to a shopping cart and book them virtually, which ended up being a “lifesaver for many of our customers, Garcia said.
In all, the Goodshuffle Pro vertical SaaS tool includes a single dashboard for rental and event production companies to track inventory, automate sales and streamline growth by being able to manage invoices, contracts, schedules and payments from one place.
The idea came from Garcia’s early career of renting out gear when he was a college disc jockey. He then joined with Erik Dreyer in 2015 to create an online marketplace for rentals, an idea that later expanded into the Goodshuffle Pro with the addition of founding team member Karen Gordon. They launched Pro in 2018.
Garcia declined to reveal revenue growth metrics, but did say the company has thousands of customers. Now with the new $5 million capital injection, the company plans to hire additional people and build out the Goodshuffle Pro along with some new features that Garcia declined to divulge yet.
“We’ve come to the point where we know we have an extremely crisp vision of what we want to build and who we need to build it,” Garcia said. “We found the right partner in FINTOP Capital, who understands that clear vision of where we’re going. The $5 million is a crystallization of that moment so that we can get the firepower talent here to execute that vision faster.”