Yplan, the London-based startup that’s building a platform for selling last-minute event-booking on mobile, has closed a $12 million (£7.9 million) Series A, led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments also participated in the round, along with a swathe of co-investors, including A-Grade, Kevin Colleran and David Morin’s Slow Ventures, and Shakil Khan, investor and advisor to Spotify and Summly.
YPlan has previously raised $1.7 million (£1.06 million) in seed funding, bringing its total funding to date to $13.7 million. The startup plans to use its new funding to fuel international expansion — with the second city (after London, where it launched in November last year) in its sights being New York. It plans to launch there during the second half of this year, and will then use New York as its North American base, as it looks to expand to other U.S. cities. London will remain as its European base as it looks to expand to other cities in the region, and also for a future push into Asia.
There’s no firm roadmap on which U.S. cities it’ll be tapping after New York but co-founder and CEO, Rytis Vitkauskas, tells TechCrunch that likely candidates include San Francisco, L.A., Boston, Chicago and Austin. “We’ll decide as we go along but the cities that we have in mind are the more densely populated cities with a lot of smartphones,” he says. “And also with a good density of events… That’s the priority list.”
Read full story at: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/04/yplan-series-a/
