Breezit is BADideas.fund's first investment

Breezit is our first investment: €100K in a marketplace with software for private event vendors.

$185 billion is spent on private event services every year in the US alone. Yet service providers (such as venue operators, photographers, caterers, and event coordinators) currently need to use separate tools to run a successful business.

They use listing sites to find customers beyond friends and family, other tools to turn leads into sales (quotes, contracts, payments), and more tools to run the business. This costs more, brings weak leads and slows every sale.

Breezit finds customers for event vendors and gives them software to run the business, in one product.

Breezit is our first investment: €100K at pre-seed on a SAFE, part of a larger round that is still closing.

Why Breezit?

Our first investment also had to show founders what we want to invest in. It had to meet these criteria:

• It had to be B2B SaaS or marketplace
• Big market: $1T
• Competitive advantage in distribution: focus on product led growth and growth loops
• Founders from CEE or with roots there, who know how to build a fast-growing startup.
• Founders with global ambition, ideally with US as the target market (as that's where part of the BADideas.fund community is based and can help with the next round in the US)

Over 100 startups had applied. This is how we chose Breezit. Having reviewed their application, we liked their vision, approach to distribution and product-led growth focus, so we advanced them to the next step: an interview.

At BADideas.fund we have members form a deal evaluation team: they interview the founders, and evaluate the startup based on our deal evaluation framework. Breezit is a SaaS enabled marketplace, so who better to lead the evaluation and interview process than Daniel Marhel, ex-CPO & CMO at Printify (the marketplace for custom printing; $54M funding), who scaled GMV to $100M.

In the one-hour interview we tried to understand how the founders think. We also gave them practical feedback on their pitch and their growth problems. We also saw reasons Breezit could fail:

• Demand: people plan weddings rarely, so Breezit needs more reasons for customers to come back and a product good enough to be remembered. This does not affect the software side.
• Risk of launching in the US: more competition than in Lithuania.

We packaged our analysis of the investment case in a structured investment memo and shared that with our members. Soon after, 21 of our members, all founders or operators, invested €100,000 in Breezit in total.