Toutix, a New York–based fan data platform for live events, has raised a $3 million seed round from Evolution Equity Partners.
The startup adds an intelligence layer on top of ticketing and other data integrations to capture deeper insight into what a fan does and purchases inside a venue. Toutix geofences an event and can glean information from opted-in fans through a smartphone app, allowing operators to capture data on food and beverage, retail and foot traffic. Understanding crowd flow can help identify chokepoints on the concourse, safety issues and undervalued real estate for sponsorships. Toutix’s fan passport acts as a loyalty program for consumers.
Toutix’s platform and data capture
The company, which has a presence in N.Y. and London, landed its first sports client with AC Newport, a Rhode Island soccer club in the National Premier Soccer League, and also works in entertainment, supporting a major Afrobeats promoter.
“The moment someone walks into a venue, you don’t know where they’re going, you don’t know what they’re buying,” said Dillane Wehbe, Toutix CEO and co-founder, of the challenge facing most properties. “You just know certain things are being bought and certain things aren’t. So we built a layer to put on top and build out a white label infrastructure so that teams, venues can understand where people are moving when they’re walking through a venue, but only within the confines of the venue.”
Operators can build fan profiles to better meet their needs, and brands will better understand the value of a sponsorship when knowing how many and how often fans walk by certain booths or activations. Its AI platform, Bruno, helps aggregate and analyze the data.
“How can we make sure every fan has the event tailored towards them,” Wehbe said, “and how can we figure out how to make sure our team monetizes as efficiently as possible?”
Wehbe, an ultraswimmer who became the first American to swim the 19-mile Arabian Gulf from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, started the company with Daniel Zhang when both were studying at Durham University Business School in the U.K. Zhang was an AI researcher, and Wehbe wrote his master’s thesis on the behavioral science of marketing live events.
