HOLLYWOOD BROADWAY: The Hollywood Pantages in California is part of the Nederlander portfolio, whose Broadway venues use booking software platform Prism (Getty Images).
Austin, Texas software firm Prism has secured $5 million in Series B funding, continuing its momentum following the pandemic and releasing new products.
“The pandemic was the time for rapid expansion of our product, and we used the time out to do that,” said Prism.fm CEO Matt Ford. “We launched the agency side of the platform and now we have thousands of concerts being planned on the agency side of the business, and the agency side and the venue side talk to each other. It was always a vision that we could create cohesion between the market. That has really come to life now.”
Prism, similar to other booking and venue management software platforms, seeks to simplify the often disorganized and decentralized approach to event management. It offers calendar management, integration with ticketing companies, offer generation, budgeting, settlement, payment tracking and more.
The $5 million funding round was led by Andrew Lindner, founding partner of Frontier Growth, who personally invested $1.55 million through a syndicate with Connor Ryan and others as a part of Frontier Growth’s ecosystem. Existing investors strongly participated in the round, including Stephen Cook, Jay Jensen, Kip Mclanahan, Advantage Capital and Rich Arnesen.
Prism.fm CEO Matt Ford.
“It’s strategically exciting for Prism, but also aligned with something the industry needs, which is further reduction of tedious tasks, so promoters and agencies can get time back, have more efficiency and coordination between their teams and the venues and promoters they’re working with,” Ford said. “Prism has taken a big chunk of that load now. We had close to a 100,000 concerts planned inside Prism in 2023, and it’s looking like that could potentially double in 2024.”
The new capital will be invested in product, engineering and go-to-market strategy, according to the announcement.
New partnerships and clients include Broadway producers Nederlander and Zamora Live, a concert promoter that owns venues and produces tours in the Latin music scene.
“Zamora is actively using our touring platform, and we’re putting a lot of technology into it, allowing independent promoters to plan tours inside of Prism, cross collateralizing shows across 30 to 40 dates. It’s more of a juggernaut to organize.” Ford notes that the tour product focuses on the talent buying and settlement aspect of a show compared with the logistics aspect.
“There’s a big market of independent promoters that are planning tours and there’s nothing out there to help them with that,” Ford said. “We’ve also built a number of ticketing integrations. We’re integrated now with Ticket Web, we have one coming with Tixr, We’re integrated with Dice, and we rebuilt our integration with See Tickets, and that all happened last year. We were busy.”
