Easol, the London-headquartered booking and payments platform used by festival promoters, launched Teammates on October 28, 2026, a set of AI agents designed to help festival and experience businesses run on autopilot, following a $30 million Series A extension. The round includes $20 million in equity from Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital and Eight Roads, plus a $10 million debt facility from Viola Credit, taking Easol’s total funding to $60 million.
Three Agents That Live Inside The Platform
Easol describes itself as an experience commerce platform, and Teammates are built to live and work directly inside it, understanding the entirety of a business rather than sitting on top as a chatbot. Its website lists three Teammates: an Easol Agent, a Sales Agent and a Support Agent. The Support Agent brings customer emails into Easol, learns a business’s products, policies, site content and FAQs, and drafts personalised replies to every new message, while the team stays in control of every response and booking action. Nothing is ever sent automatically, Easol says, and no booking changes, cancellations or refunds are completed without approval.
The pitch is aimed at a specific pain. Many festivals operate with small central teams, which leads to missed revenue: guests who never book the add-on they wanted, payments that slip through the cracks, support queues that grow faster than headcount. Easol argues that with Teammates, promoters can put their revenue on autopilot, with specialist agents working as an extension of the team while staff focus on customer relationships and delivering the experience itself.
Developed over the past two years, Teammates draw on data from across a promoter’s operation, including bookings, payments and customer history. In one example cited by Easol, an agent working for a ski festival identified hundreds of pass holders who had not booked equipment rental, compiled a list of those guests and prepared outreach targeting an opportunity Easol values at around $50,000 in revenue. In another, a festival used Teammates to find $28,000 in recoverable payments within seconds, work that had previously taken two days.
New Clients, And A Necessary Clarification
Easol says it has signed new clients including Coachella, Stagecoach, Head Trip, Elements Festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, Boots in the Park and Snowboxx. Four of those names, Coachella, Stagecoach, Head Trip and Camp Flog Gnaw, appear on the festival roster of Goldenvoice, the California promoter owned by AEG Presents, and the detail matters: Easol powers the hospitality sites for Coachella, Stagecoach and Camp Flog Gnaw, which sell packages bundling festival passes with hotel stays, and says it played a similar role for Head Trip. Easol also says none of the four took part in the Teammates beta, though touring country music festival Boots in the Park did and now uses the agents.
That distinction is worth stating plainly, because a client list and a product rollout are different things. Easol’s hospitality work for major festivals is real, and its Teammates adoption is at an earlier stage, led by promoters like Boots in the Park. The company puts the number of guests who have booked experiences through its platform so far in 2026 at 2.8 million, across more than 135 countries, with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles.
Co-founder and chief executive Ben Simpson said Easol was built to give promoters control over their entire business and bring their technology in-house, and that AI now lets it support promoters in scaling their business and growing revenue in ways it could not have imagined when the platform launched. He added that the experience businesses that adopt AI will have a competitive advantage that will be transformative, able to look after every guest like never before.
Why It Matters
This matters because the festival business is caught between rising demand and thinning margins. In the UK, the Association of Independent Festivals has counted 41 festivals cancelled, postponed or brought to an end so far in 2026, following 43 in 2025 and 78 in 2024, which it described as a record. Audiences still want live experiences, but promoters face higher costs and tighter margins, and the businesses that survive will be the ones that capture revenue their small teams currently miss. Agents that find recoverable payments in seconds, or spot hundreds of guests who never booked rental equipment, attack exactly that gap.
The same logic is spreading through customer-facing work, from super apps opening to outside AI agents to agentic selling that keeps humans in control and callers talking in their own language with AI help. The test for Easol, as for all of them, is whether agents earn trust by staying inside their approvals, or whether autopilot becomes a euphemism for decisions nobody checked.
Background
Easol was co-founded by Lisa Simpson and Ben Simpson, who ran their own events before launching the platform, including snowsports and music festival Rise and adventure travel series Beyond Adventures, and its original Series A round, announced in December 2021, raised $25 million led by Tiger Global.
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