Event App Builder Guidebook Launches New Platform and Announces $10M in Funding

Guidebook helps live events of all sizes build low­cost and effective mobile apps for their attendees.

July 15, 2015, Palo Alto, CA ­ Guidebook today announced the launch of a new event app building tool, Guidebook Builder, which gives any event the ability to easily create and manage native iOS and Android event apps for their attendees.

In the past two years Guidebook users have launched 25,000 mobile guides designed to transform the attendee experience. From 100­person corporate training sessions to conventions with hundreds of thousands of attendees, Guidebook provides event organizers with an effective and low­cost solution to design, build and deploy mobile apps themselves.

“We’re thrilled with how the events industry has embraced Guidebook,” said Jeff Lewis, Founder and CEO. “We’ve found that because our product is so flexible and has a low barrier to entry, its uses have been as varied as our clients.

Event professionals have been in desperate need of a way to have complete control over their mobile apps. Guidebook Builder provides that solution and eliminates any need to deal with the bugs and crashes that come with custom development.”

Guidebook Builder’s drag­and­drop interface empowers event organizers with no programming experience to easily build and manage mobile event guides while maintaining control of the content before, during and after an event. In just four years the Silicon Valley­based technology company has quietly established a world­class client base within the events industry, including large events such as New York Comic Con and product launches, sales kickoffs, and other internal and external meetings run by organizations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Guidebook is revolutionizing a mobile app development market largely served by consultancies which offer custom apps for high up­front fees and unpredictable maintenance costs. Guidebook is the only fully functional event app builder to offer a free version of its software. The company has lowered the traditionally high barrier to entry in the event app space by reducing the time it takes to launch a mobile guide to as little as an hour, and by offering a subscription model which eliminates startup fees and allows customers to predict ongoing costs.

Today Guidebook also made its first funding announcement, disclosing it has raised $10 million to date in seed and Series A funding. London­based Mosaic Ventures co­led the financing with MHS Capital. With the help of their investors, Guidebook plans to continue its rapid growth in Europe. As part of the Series A financing, Toby Coppel, one of Mosaic’s founding partners, has joined Guidebook’s board of directors.

“The Guidebook team has developed a best­in­class platform that offers a solution for any organization in any industry to design and build a native app in an easy and low cost way.” said Coppel.

“With the world of mobile apps changing quickly, multiple platforms to support, and good talent expensive to hire, Guidebook offers a compelling alternative to building an app in­house or outsourcing custom development. We’re excited to partner with Guidebook. The new platform enables them to expand the range of industries and customers they can serve, and we have no doubt that tens of millions of people will be using apps built by Guidebook in the next few years.”

Guidebook is based in Palo Alto, CA and has been making it easy for people to create mobile guides for their events, organizations and places since 2011. For more information visit www.guidebook.com or contact Jordan McArthur, Content Marketing Manager, at jmcarthur@guidebook.com.