European firm Oxynade recently raised 1 Million Euros of first round venture funding from venture capital firm Arkafund and Flanders-based seed investor Vinnof.
Oxynade, co-founded by Belgium based engineers Hans Nissens and Niko Nelissen, will be using the funding primarily to continue development into Oxynade’s flagship product Happenr.
Happenr is essentially an events search engine for Europe. The site makes it’s database of indexed events available via search on the homepage as well as offering the service to other sites via an API. The startup also plans to sell tickets through the Happenr site during the early stages of 2009 – presumably a core element of it’s business model.
According to Robin Wauters, an initial investor as well as Techcrunch writer and ex-TheNextWeb editor, Happenr is differentiating itself on the fact that it indexes events not only from a select few larger event sites but also hyper local sources such as local community sites.
Differentiation is clearly a big factor here as there isn’t a shortage of competition. From zvents, now-in.org, tickex to the more popular Eventful and Yahoo’s Upcoming – Happenr are going to need to battle to remain ahead. However in Europe and the Hyper Local events market, the boys from Belgium may have found a niche many other companies haven’t targeted with as much precision (yet).
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