In this interview, Harold Hughes, founder and CEO of Bandwagon, outlines his company’s mission to provide identity infrastructure that lets businesses transparently manage, aggregate, and store consumer data, enabling personalized, non‑spammy experiences. He shares Bandwagon’s origins as a 2015 Founder Institute Greenville cohort graduate, its venture backing (over $2 million raised from Backstage Capital, Capital Factory, Realist Ventures, and the South Carolina state investment arm), and his experience running an equity‑crowdfunding campaign on Republic, now serving as a venture partner with the platform. Hughes also discusses his role as an angel investor, emphasizing the dual path of building and investing to create generational wealth. Finally, he announces the recent acquisition and launch of IdealSeat, an embeddable event ticketing and registration tool designed to help creators and organizations quickly set up ticketing solutions, especially relevant during the COVID‑era when in‑person connections are limited. He is based in Austin, Texas.
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Yeah, excellent. Thank you. I appreciate it. So I'm the founder and CEO of Bandwagon. We are an identity infrastructure company that gives companies the ability to transparently manage, aggregate, and store consumer data. So basically, really want to help your— the folks you're buying products from or buying services from really be able to curate the products and services they're delivering by knowing you better. Everyone hates spam. Everyone hates vanilla and bland experiences, and so we're trying to help make that better. We are graduates of the 2015, the first cohort out of Founder Institute in South Carolina. I think we're the only ones in the Carolinas, was the Greenville chapter. So we went through that, we're venture-backed, we raised just over $2 million, couple of investors like Backstage Capital, Capital Factory, Realist Ventures, the state of South Carolina's investment arm as well. We did an equity crowdfunding campaign as well via Republic. So I've got experience on that and happy to share some insight on that. And now that I'm on the other side of having done that campaign, I'm also working with them as a venture partner. So if you're open and interested to learn more about potentially having a campaign on Republic, definitely let me know. And then lastly, I've been fortunate to become an angel investor in a couple of companies. That's been really, really cool because I think that Oftentimes we look at how generational wealth is created, and one of those is starting the company, the other is investing. And so I'm trying to make sure we're doing both to give ourselves as many shots at, you know, shots on goal as you can have. So that's what I've been up to, and I'm here in Austin, Texas.
Awesome. Yeah, and Virginia, I'm not looking at the chat right now, you may have done it already, but share some of Harold's information in there. And also, Harold, you guys just, you acquired Ideal Seat as well. So for everybody else, in the audience, check out idealseat.com. It's a company where you can embed registration for events and stuff into your site, something you guys are, I'm sure, is probably taking up majority of your time right now, right?
Yep, yep, that's definitely something we're excited about. We think that, you know, while the NFL and these major events aren't having fans there, a lot of us are still trying to find ways to connect, right? We desire human connectivity and we want to be in person, and so We wanted to create a very simple tool that allowed anyone from a content creator, an artist, to a massive organization to be able to very easily create a ticketing solution and be complementary to what they do. So that acquisition worked out really, really well for us to get off the ground pretty quickly. So we're glad to have it launched as of, you know, 2 weeks ago.
Awesome. All right, making moves in the, in the, in the, during COVID here.
