Continuing with its entrepreneurial whirlwind, Fredericton-based conference support company OneLobby has closed its $500,000 seed round and pivoted to become an event management application.
OneLobby began earlier this year with
In the ensuing months, as they raised funds, the team realized there was a problem with their business model. They were solving the pain of conference attendees (who needed to network online before, during and after conferences) but they were asking conference organizers to pay for it.
To get real traction, they felt they had to solve the pain of the people who were paying for the service – the event organizers. So they pivoted (a startup term for adopting a new business model) so their system meets the needs of conference organizers themselves.
“We’re now focused on event management,” said Smith in an interview Friday from San Francisco, where the team is meeting potential investors. “We’ll still do the event networking, but it’s no longer the same focus.”
Murphy said the new focus will be a collaborative Software-as-a-Service solution that will help conference providers organize and manage events, so they can contact suppliers, book speakers, etc. Though it’s an SaaS application, he added it will have a platform that users can add features to.
The company, which now has 25 early adopters, has been part of the recent hiring binge by New Brunswick tech companies and now has a staff of six. It is also looking for a third software developer.
Smith said the company has raised precisely $500,000 including the $120,000 that the OneLobby team has invested. Most of the investors are angels from New Brunswick. However, one shareholder from San Francisco has come in with $20,000 and will help to connect OneLobby with Silicon Valley venture capital firms as they work to raise a VC round next year.
Dunphy is best known for being Employee No. 1 at the social media monitoring platform Radian6, which sold out to Salesforce.com last year. Murphy is the founder and former
