The round comes from newly-established fund, Deep Ventures, and is the only funding taken by BookingBug since its seed round of $350,000 back in 2011.
BookingBug launched in 2009 as a way for smaller sole traders, businesses, and community groups to share and charge for their availability -– by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events –- providing a platform to accept those bookings and handle inquiries online.
However, BookingBug has since expanded its customer base to also target the enterprise becoming less and less reliant on SMEs who are increasingly being offered an array of niche/dedicated platforms.
With this new funding the company plans to completely open up its protocol to select developers and become a platform instead of a ‘widget’
BookingBug CEO Glenn Shoosmith said that their expansion plans are ‘to make its platform fully customisable and embeddable into existing systems used by the enterprises, big retailers and government organisations that it’s now selling into.’
Shoosmith said that he was inspired by the UK government’s “open” e-gov agenda, and that demand for a more expansive platform also came from those larger customers.
