Tix Africa's Nosa Oyegun and Folayemi Agusto are leading the event tech charge

Residents of Nigeria’s most popular and most populous city, Lagos, may have heard of the famous EatDrinkFestival that happens every December but they may not know the trailblazers behind it.

At a time where eating out at fancy restaurants was becoming a norm in Lagos, Nosa Oyegun and Folayemi Agusto or Nosa and Folly as they’re fondly called, created the popular Eat.Drink.Lagos (EDL) blog to visit, review and rate Lagos-based restaurants. The platform quickly became the go-to platform for Lagos foodies to find out about the good, the bad and the ugly of the city’s food scene. Now, EDL isn’t just a blog, it is a high tech platform where visitors and residents alike can search for places to eat in Lagos, based on different search parameters. ​

As the EDL blog became increasingly popular, Nosa and Folly began to curate experiences for foodies in Lagos, giving them the opportunity to try new restaurants at different locations. From there, they decided to create a much larger event that would see Lagos’ top restaurants and food vendors bid for space at a venue that will welcome thousands of guests. This was the birth of the EatDrinkFestival, which has now become a staple event in the Lagos annual “Detty December” calendar.

It was during this time that Nosa and Folly noticed a gap in the market for tech-enabled event ticketing, as they had experienced many challenges with ticketing and payments for EatDrinkFestival. They decided to tackle the issue by themselves by creating tix.africa, a self-service ticketing platform for event creators.

The beta version of tix only allowed guests to purchase tickets and event organisers to list an event for sale. Then, during the pandemic, they added support for virtual events and integrated with Zoom to make that happen, allowing for event organisers to create an event on tix, sell tickets, register guests and host the event on Zoom without needing a Zoom subscription.

Recently, the company announced that it had closed an undisclosed 6 figure pre-seed round, led by HoaQ, to scale its event apps, and to expand operations to Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Egypt in H2 of 2021. With this new funding, they have also announced: “tix pro” - a subscription plan for event organisers, with features that help them schedule recurring events, unlimited custom fields for data collection, premium zoom integration and lower transaction fees.

Over the next few months, the tix.africa team will be working on tix pro and developing their core technologies — ticketing, access, and cashless, and also working on developing their own native virtual event space - an idea that was birthed thanks to the digital acceleration that was brought about by the pandemic.

“Event management has been hard for us in the past and we want to fix that. Our goal is to build the simplest self-service ticketing platform to give event creators all the tools they need - ticketing, admitting guests, and collecting payments - as simply and as quickly as possible.” - Folayemi Agusto.

We are looking forward to all the innovative event capabilities that will come from the tix.africa team as the world steadily opens up and events begin to take place again..

Connect with Nosa Oyegun and Folayemi Agusto on LinkedIn.