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ogaVenue, a Lagos-based online events venue booking platform, announced on Thursday that it has raised a $45,000 (N14.7 million) seed investment from Spark, a Lagos-based venture capital firm,  and Hotels.ng, an online hotel booking company.

According to a statement released by ogaVenue, the investment will enable the company to expand into more states across Nigeria. Launched in 2014, the online events venue booking platform allows individual or corporate event organisers to search for ideal venues for weddings, conferences or birthday parties. The platform has an inventory of over 2000 event venue options across 17 states in Nigeria, including Lagos.

“We are incredibly excited to join the Spark family as it houses some of the most successful startups in Nigeria and arguably as helped to grow the most successful founders in Nigeria,” said Andrew Airelobhegbe, CEO of ogaVenue. “We’re also thrilled to have attracted the attention of, and investment from Hotels.ng, a pioneering travel business we have long since admired and followed.  With them on board, we are certain that together, we will radically change the face of events and hospitality in Nigeria and Africa.”

Nigeria’s events industry is reportedly valued at $20 billion, with 25 percent of each event cost spent on venue rental. Over 20,000 events are estimated to take place each month in Lagos, with about $300 million spent on organizing social events each year in the state.

“The OgaVenue venue team combined their strong technical backgrounds with a high sense of commerciality and quickly established industry leadership in the venue booking space," said Bastian Gotter, Co-founder of Spark. "We believe this investment is complementary to our earlier investments in Hotels.ng and are very happy to partner with them in supporting OgaVenue with capital and advice. We hope OgaVenue will continue to expand its industry leadership and win big.”

Each venue listing on ogaVenue provides detailed information including availability, location, capacity, facilities, costing, images (including virtual 360° visits) and policies. Users can also read reviews provided by other users.

Mark Essien, Founder and CEO of Hotels.ng, said: “Seeing how closely his business is related to ours, it was obvious that getting involved in this deal would be to both of our advantages - there are clear synergies that can be leveraged on to accelerate growth in both the hotel and the event segments.”