January 31, 2017: Singapore-based events management startup venture PouchNATION has closed a funding round involving Malaysia’s early-stage venture fund, Cradle Seed Ventures and a group of private Singaporean investors. Financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed. The venture through an event management system helps organisers manage large scale events. The startup raised a seven-digit sum in US dollars to build a data-driven solution. An existing investor in the firm is Captii Ventures, which led a $520,000 seed investment in June 2015. The company’s event management system uses NFC (near field communication) wristbands to replace paper tickets as passes and enables cashless payments within the venue. It also enables crowd control by restricting entry to specific parts of the venue and can operate offline should networks crash. PouchNATION was started as a rewards platform in 2012 but evolved into a cashless payment and event management system, with its wristbands solving pain points such as security, theft, fraud, event flow and event control. The use of the wristbands also aids in minimising the sale of counterfeit passes. According to CEO Ilya Kravtsov, the latest investment will help in development of their analytics capabilities, which leverages on the offline element of the wristbands to collect and analyse customer behaviour with higher levels of precision than other tracking tools. In an exchange with Tech in Asia, Kravtsov explained: “The data that is collected revolves around spending behavior, personal preferences, crowd moving patterns, heat maps, and interaction with newly launched products with a very specific focus on certain target communities such as millennials and the wellness community.” This will allow PouchNation to expand its revenue model and monetise its data, allowing event organisers and brands to further refine their event design and formats, as well as provide better targeting for event marketing.
