Imagine you’re planning a surprise birthday party for a friend. You’ll need vendors for food, drinks, and decorations. If you’re short on time but have a decent budget, you may consider hiring an event planner.
After engaging their services, how do you actually manage everything? How do you find the right vendors? Then comes communicating your needs, making changes on the fly, sorting out payments, and even sending out invitations.
You get the picture. Planning a surprise birthday party can turn into a lot of work, especially when you’re juggling multiple messaging apps, spreadsheets, and payment platforms.
That was the situation Oluwapelumi Adewoyin found himself in in 2019 when he wished there was a platform where he could manage everything all at once.
Over the next few years, he watched as COVID-19 drove many small businesses online, and a cash crunch in Nigeria forced many to accept digital payments. Against this backdrop, he co-founded EventPark with Faruq Musodiq-Bishi in 2025 to build an all-in-one platform for event management.
The market opportunity
It’s a running joke that Nigerians can turn anything into a reason to celebrate. Lost your father? Let’s organise a wake — half solemn remembrance, half an excuse to eat, drink, and gather the whole community. Welcomed a new baby? Of course, we’re having a naming ceremony, complete with food, music, and plenty of guests who may or may not even know the parents that well.
By now, you get the point. Millions of Nigerians host events annually, creating a huge ecosystem that is largely broken and with little digitisation. By some estimates, that market is valued at approximately $20 billion. It’s a small part of a global industry worth more than $1 trillion.
It’s also an industry that has seen investments of more than $1 billion in the last decade. Only recently, Eventbrite was the subject of a $500 million acquisition by Bending Spoons.
The EventPark experience
EventPark enters the market with a suite of tools designed to bring order to an often chaotic industry.
At its core is a free guest-management system that replaces the patchwork of spreadsheets and messaging apps many planners still rely on. An accompanying invitation-management tool automatically generates event invitations based on user input and tracks RSVPs in real time.
The platform also enhances the guest experience. Event owners and attendees can upload photos to a public event gallery, which can be used on social media or depending on the event owner’s directives. A QR code allows guests to add the event directly to their calendars, improving attendance and reducing scheduling mishaps.
EventPark also provides tools for financial planning. A gifting registry allows event owners to share what gifts they have with attendees, who can choose to buy an item outright or split the bill with other guests. Meanwhile, an AI-driven budgeting tool helps planners allocate funds more efficiently.
Payments are routed through an escrow system. Vendors only get funds upon successful completion of their obligations.
Vendors who wish to get more visibility can promote their services through in-app advertising, and both planners and vendors have access to buy-now-pay-later options, easing cash-flow constraints that often hamper event execution.
EventPark supports tiered access controls. With this feature, an event owner can add individuals with varying access levels, allowing them to delegate responsibilities or co-plan events with friends and family.
A vendor marketplace allows event owners to quickly find reliable vendors without searching through multiple platforms. Vendor reliability is addressed through a dual verification process, combining in-person checks with CAC registration checks to ensure that only credible service providers make it onto the platform.
“The goal is to have everything you need to plan an event in one ecosystem. We’re not changing what already happens; we’re simply digitising the process,” Musodiq-Bishi shared with Techpoint Africa.
The startup provides most of its tools to both event organisers and vendors at no cost, generating revenue instead through commissions on vendor transactions.
Additional income streams include margins from its buy-now-pay-later service — offered in partnership with financial institutions — as well as payments from vendors seeking increased visibility through in-app promotional placements.
The faces behind EventPark
Before founding EventPark, both co-founders built substantial experience across several Nigerian industries.
Musodiq-Bishi began his career on Jumia’s sales team, spending a year there before moving to the fintech firm Riby, where he first met Adewoyin. He later transitioned into the betting industry, taking on roles in operations, business development, and sales, eventually serving as country lead for Betway and supporting Orbital’s market launch in Kenya.
Adewoyin, for his part, has developed deep product expertise at some of Nigeria’s leading technology companies, including Konga, LemFi, Autochek, and, more recently, Moniepoint. He also held roles at Alat and Squad, the fintech subsidiary of GTBank.
Competitive landscape and future outlook
EventPark is launching right as the country’s event management space is heating up, drawing in startups eager to use technology to solve problems that have plagued the industry for years.
PartyVest recently launched, providing a platform for users to discover events, make payments, and capture memories seamlessly. The startup is also backed by PiggyVest and Zrosk, giving it a significant head start.
Elsewhere, Tix, a ticketing startup, has grown from a side project to one of the leading events platforms in the country, facilitating ticket sales of over 2 billion in 2023 while planning an expansion into the UK and Rwanda.
Still, Musodiq-Bishi is optimistic about the startup’s chances. Ten events have been planned using the platform so far, and the startup has secured $200,000 out of a planned $600,000 pre-seed round.
The key advantage, he argues, lies in the founding team’s extensive experience operating within marketplace environments, coupled with strong sales and product expertise. He adds that the startup has secured backing from several seasoned Nigerian entrepreneurs.
Among them is Chris Ubosi, founder and CEO of Megaletrics, a media company that operates multiple radio stations nationwide, an asset that could offer EventPark considerable leverage in advertising.
EventPark gets a few things right. Its founders bring experience from some of Nigeria’s most recognisable startups, giving them a working understanding of marketplace dynamics, operations, and product development.
The platform itself offers a broad suite of tools for the end-to-end management of events. That could give the company an advantage in attracting early users. Still, success is far from guaranteed.
The competitive landscape is already crowded, with PartyVest offering a comparable mix of planning tools, payments, and a discovery marketplace for events. In other words, Event Park isn’t walking into an untouched market.
Its differentiation must come from execution, product depth, vendor reliability, or the strength of the network effects it is able to build. As with any marketplace, growth hinges on achieving a steady flow of both event hosts and credible vendors, no small feat in a sector defined by informality and trust gaps.
Yet the broader structural forces remain in Event Park’s favour. Demand for technology-driven event services continues to rise across Nigeria as planners embrace digital payments, hybrid formats, and more professionalised tools.
Most existing players still focus narrowly on ticketing or simple guest-list management, leaving room for a platform that can genuinely manage the full lifecycle of an event. If Event Park can capture that gap and scale its marketplace effectively, it stands a reasonable chance of carving out meaningful market share.
With its first version built and currently undergoing testing, Musodiq-Bishi says the company’s immediate priority is to consolidate its presence in Nigeria before pursuing expansion plans in the fourth quarter of 2026.