Data startup Fever has raised $35 million in Series D funding led by Rabuten Capital. The funding caps off more than $76 million already raised in order to leave the startup’s competitors in the dust. Question is, will $35 million be enough?
Fever is a mobile app and social discovery tool that presents users with a curated and personalized list of local events. The most recent funding round saw Rakuten Capital joined by Accel, Atresmedia, and others investing in a startup currently focused on a limited number of cities.
Fever’s current marketplace experiences are in Bilbao, Ibiza, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manchester, New York, Malaga, Paris, Seville, and Valencia. The company says it plans to accelerate expansion. According to news from PhocusWire, Fever will also boost its engineering and data science teams.
The Fever app uses a recommendation algorithm to personalize listings of experiences for fashion events, music festivals, theatre, and more. I am not sure what advantages Fever has over the event and location app morphed into data analytics startup Gravy, I hope Fever does not go down the same path. At least Gravy has done better than Vamos, which hit the dead pool diving some months back.
The Fever app reminds me of a much abbreviated Stay.com, which our content team helped build some years back. Back then Stay was ranked in the top 50 websites of 2010 by TIME magazine before its game-changing app was released. I’m a bit surprised none of the tech news blogs or magazines seem curious about how well the app works? Anyhow.
My only negative so far is the fact the cities featured are not fully built out, and the system seems to want to present everything to me in Spanish. Beyond this, there are many good filtering and usability plusses to go along with very good graphics and layout.
To be honest, I’ll admit a bit of chagrin here given I’ve worked with hundreds of startups (many much better than Fever) that had nowhere near 70-something million in their war chests.
I’ll keep an eye on this way, if for no other reason to see if some big-time VC people made a good or a bad bet. Fever makes me want to go back into tech analysis and beta testing. Hmm. It just occurred to me, is this a data mining app? Guess I’ll ask their CEO.
