WeddingWire, a Chevy Chase, Md.-based company that automates the wedding planning process, has taken on a $350 million investment designed to help it scale internationally, the firm has announced.
The investment is seen as a major step forward for founder Tim Chi, an emerging business leader in the Washington area who also co-founded the education technology company Blackboard. In a recent interview, Chi said the company plans to use the extra capital to expand deeper into global markets, adding fuel to a broader business shift that started in 2015.
Permira, a $37.7 billion fund, is adding WeddingWire to a consumer technology portfolio that includes recognized names such as Ancestry.com and LegalZoom.com.
Permira “has a proven track record of helping companies expand globally,” Chi said.
WeddingWire has built its business serving as an all-purpose e-commerce and event management platform that includes everything a newly engaged couple might need to plan a wedding. For customers, it offers technology to bridge what Chi calls “pain points” that have dogged couples for generations.
For the diverse array of businesses that touch the $200 billion weddings industry, that means an easy way to find business online. The company maintains a directory of 400,000 wedding vendors that includes photographers, florists, DJs and more.
Chi said little would change when it comes to the company’s business model, even as it adapts its product to new countries and markets.
“We’re going to continue to do exactly the same thing we’ve been doing for the last 11 years, which is, as a marketplace, making sure that all of our customers, the wedding professionals making that special day happen, are seeing business,” he said.
The firm pushed into overseas markets in 2015 when it bought a European competitor called Wedding Planner, giving it an office in Barcelona and a foothold in Europe. Today, international business accounts for more than 40 percent of the company’s revenue, the largest portion of which comes from Europe.
Revenue from those markets is increasing about 30 percent each year, according to a release published by the company.
“The sort of industrial logic for that has been that we felt that weddings are truly global,” Chi said. “Culturally they can be different, but as far as the execution of them and the pain points, that’s sort of universal.”
More recently, the firm is making inroads into the Indian subcontinent, opening an office in Delhi where it helps coordinate weddings in a few large Indian cities. Expanding into Canada and Britain was also a focus for the company last year.
WeddingWire has been somewhat unique in the tech start-up world in that it has been profitable for much of its growth.
The company has grown quickly since it was founded in Chi’s basement in 2006. Chi declined to disclose exact revenue figures but said the company crossed the $100 million revenue mark last year, something that is considered a major steppingstone separating late-stage start-ups from larger tech companies. The company has been profitable “for many, many years,” he said.
Even as the company has expanded internationally, it has said that it wants to remain rooted in the Washington area where it was founded. The company recently renewed an eight-year lease for its headquarters in Chevy Chase.
“We’re big supporters of this region,” Chi said. “We grew up here, and we continue to believe that the tech talent here is exceptional.”
