Entr (now rebranded as Planned) is a web platform enabling corporate event planners to create events within minutes. From the trendiest venues to the perfect caterer Entr will help you to create an amazing experience.

I met Marc-Antoine Bonin a few years back while he was in the early steps of his previous project Uvolt. At the time I helped out for the promotion of their product and we kept in touch afterwards even when his project failed.

At some point Marc reached out to ask if I would join his next startup but at the time I was still working full time at Poches & Fils and their project wasn’t really defined so I declined a few times but Marc is a great entrepreneur and not the kind of person who easily abandon an idea, so he kept reaching out. 

A few months later they finally started to get things moving and I decided to make my second significant private investment to help out by being their first investor in the pre-seed round. We then succeeded to onboard a few more Angels over the following months to raise a 170k pre-seed to speed up the growth and development.

Having no technical co-founder I started to help out more and more with product development and acted as a mentor for a bunch of other things ranging from accounting to Human Resources as I had more experience than the other founders with businesses in general.

Since I ended up working more and more with the team and that I really liked the impact I had I decided to take a leap and leave my active role at P&F to fill in as technical co-founder in order to ensure that the odds would be in our favor up until we would get to the next major milestone.

In the following months we had the honor of winning the McGill Dobson Cup, we made an appearance at ‘’dans l’oeil du dragon’’ (quebec’s version of Shark Tank) where we received offers from Christiane Germain and Dominique Brown, we were selected to be a part of the Fondation Montreal Inc cohort and we were even invited down in San Francisco to pitch in the final selection round of Y Combinator.

We started working with more and more big clients like l’Oreal, BMO, Element AI, Michael Kors and many more and due to this momentum we were able to secure a Seed round from world class investors and VC’s.

We raised 1.13M $ from iNovia, THCap, Interaction Ventures (LP Maurice & François Arbour), Peter Kern (Expedia), Guillaume Jacquet (Chronogolf) and another private strategic investor.  

With the money in the bank we were able to grow the team to over 15 qualified members and we now had the means to bring in key players to get the business to the next level more quickly.

In the hiring process we got the opportunity to bring in a CTO with 14 years of experience that would be able to handle the technical side of the business better than me, so I offered to step out and go back to my investor role in order to bring him in and free even more financial resources for new hires.

This decision to go back to my initial support role also helped me to regain more time for my family, my health and the required focus to start setting up my next ventures.

The company has since raised a small bridge round and recently closed a Serie A financing. The team has grown to over 30 exceptional employees and expanded across North America.

*The company survived the Covid-19 crisis by scaling down during the pandemic and focusing on building an amazing product experience. The bet paid off as they are now back with a stronger competitive advantage and more enterprise deal secured.

My year at Entr :

• Kickstart a 170k pre-seed round
• Led the product development of our marketplace
• Shipped and operated the various iterations of the marketplace
• Developed prototypes for the event planner SaaS platform
• Created a complete product roadmap for the company
• Helped create over 15 new jobs
• Mentored 2 incredible co-founders
• Helped more than 200 events take shape
• Generated millions in GMV even in the first year of business
• Actively worked to secure a 1.13M $ seed round