Experiential Marketplace Recess Raises $5M Series A

LOS ANGELES, Calif.— Recess, the leading experiential marketing platform connecting brands with events and venues, announced its $5 million Series A led by Data Point Capital and Spring Mountain Capital. The round brings the total raise by the company to $11.5 million.

As pandemic restrictions ease, experiential marketing in the US is seeing double-digit gains*. Recess is the first marketplace that gives brands the power to create experiential marketing campaigns with a simple online self-service model, versus the traditional manual and time-consuming methods that often involve spreadsheets and phone calls to arrange. Using data-driven decision making, analytics and measurement capabilities, Recess connects brands with target audiences at events and venues in the Recess marketplace, including WeWork, SoulCycle, Equinox, Spartan Race, Brookfield Zoo, major music festivals, college campuses, farmers markets, and more.

Since its last round, Recess has grown its network of events and venues 100x, increased its nationwide audience reach to 230M+, doubled its headcount, and added marquee brand customers including DoorDash, Milk Bar, Oakley, Mondelez, and Red Bull. The new funding will be used to further develop its programmatic targeting capabilities, advanced analytics offerings, and to expand its marketing, sales, and engineering teams.

“At Data Point, we seek to partner with talented founders who are disrupting enormous markets,” said Geoff Oblak, managing partner at Data Point Capital.  “We have been extremely impressed by the company’s success in attracting both industry leading consumer brands and major venue owners.  With their innovative marketplace, Recess has a tremendous opportunity to bring the experiential marketing industry online.”

“Recess excites us because it is bringing marketplace technology to a huge but opaque and inefficient area of marketing spend – product sampling, event sponsorship and activation services,” said Raymond Wong, Head of Growth Equity at Spring Mountain Capital. “Its platform provides liquidity for the first time between brands and event organizers, addressing a currently unmet need of modern marketers.”

Brands can leverage Recess’ data-driven marketplace to identify events and venues whose audiences match their target users and easily deploy turnkey sampling and other in-person marketing campaigns to reach and convert these audiences. With a centralized contracting, payments, and logistics system, Recess customers are saving countless hours and driving measurable ROI.  Brands can also amplify their experiential activations with digital, social, and email marketing extensions to build omnichannel campaigns.

“We truly believe in the power of experiential and in-person moments to drive business results for brands and we aim to make experiential easy, efficient, and accessible,” said Jack Shannon, CEO and co-founder of Recess. “Our brand partners are saving time and money while experiencing incredible results from the vast number of partnership opportunities available to them.”

Additional participants in the round include Ben Hindman (Splash) and existing investors including Aperiam Ventures, Marshall Sandman’s Animal Capital, Marc Simons (Giant Spoon), and social media influencers Josh Richards, Griffin Johnson, and Noah Beck. Mark Cuban was an early seed investor in Recess.

* PQ Media’s Global Experiential Marketing Forecast

About Recess

Recess is the leading experiential partnerships platform that helps brands engage and acquire new customers via event and venue partnerships at scale. Brands can discover, execute and measure turnkey experiential partnerships with thousands of events and venues reaching 230M+ consumers, using a single platform.

For More Information:
https://www.recess.is/