Goodshufflebuilding software for the event rental and production industry, has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round from FINTOP Capital.
The global pandemic “wiped out a lot 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 — turned out to be “remarkably resilient.”
“Many of them have been able to stay alive and continue to provide this temporary infrastructure for COVID testing sites, for example,” Garcia said. “And if the events were still going to happen, they had to be outside, so some of them even started side businesses making and renting personal protective equipment.”
Goodshuffle had also just developed what Garcia called “wishlist integration, which was similar to a Shopify plugin that allowed businesses to link their inventory and offerings to their website like a virtual showroom. Customers could browse inventory, add items to a shopping cart and check out virtually, which ended up being “a lifesaver for a lot of our customers,” Garcia said.
Overall, the Goodshuffle Pro vertical SaaS tool includes a single dashboard for rental and event production companies to track inventory, automate sales and streamline development, with the ability to manage invoices, contracts, schedules and payments from one place .
The idea came from Garcia’s early career renting equipment when he was a college disc jockey. He then teamed up with Erik Dreyer in 2015 to create an online marketplace for rentals, an idea that later expanded into Goodshuffle Pro with the addition of founding team member Karen Gordon. They launched Pro in 2018.
Garcia declined to disclose revenue growth metrics, but said the company has thousands of customers. Now with the new $5 million in capital, the company plans to hire additional people and build out Goodshuffle Pro along with some new features that Garcia declined to reveal yet.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we know we have an extremely clear vision of what we want to build and who we need to build it,” Garcia said. “We have found the right partner in FINTOP Capital, who understands this clear vision of where we are going. The $5 million is a crystallization of that moment so we can get the firepower talent here to execute that vision faster.”
