Startmate alumni Evatto raises $1.02 million pre-Seed

Events management startup Evatto has staged a $1.02 million pre-Seed round as it looks to expand offshore.

The raise was led by Perth VC Purpose Ventures and will go towards product development, international expansion and fresh faces on the team.

The year-old Sydney startup is building an AI-powered enterprise platform for managing complex event programs, replacing the spreadsheets, emails and recycled templates that still are standard practice in the sector.

Evatto is already working with organisations including the Invictus Games and Canada Snowboard for events such as World Cups and the X Games, and is currently working on pilot programs with several other enterprise customers.

The platform handles event scoping, stakeholder coordination, approval workflows, documentation and operational readiness. Its AI agents are designed to automate a lot of the administrative work needed to deliver large events.

Cofounder and CEO Hailey Mason spent more than 20 years producing large-scale events for the likes of Red Bull, Casio, and FIFA. She teamed up with COO Chris Toward, a top Australian events industry leader, in 2025 to launch Evatto (known then as Wiingman). And after joining Startmate’s Summer 26 program earlier this year, still as Wiingman, they crossed the finish line at top speed for Demo Day at Blackbird’s Sunrise.

The problem Mason saw was that major event programs still relied heavily on manual processes.

“Event programs worth millions are still run on manual administration,” she said.

“The pain is immediate and the market is massive. Enterprise teams are ready for a system of work built specifically for this problem, and we’re just getting started.”

Toward said discussions with large global event teams had confirmed that administrative workloads remained a significant and largely overlooked problem.

“Freeing our customers from spreadsheet hell and letting them focus on strategy and experience is why we built this,” he said.

Purpose Ventures’ Kylie Gerrard said they backed Evatto because of the 50-plus years of industry experience the founders have, their understanding of the problem and international ambitions.

“That combination of domain depth, real conviction and scale is rare,” she said.