EPIC co-founder focuses on better event bookings after food-hall closure
After getting sick of the friction involved in booking events, the co-founder of the shuttered EPIC Market has decided to develop a new software-based venture called Better Venu.
"After this last year and a half, we've run 300-plus events, and (have dealt with) many times that amount in terms of inquiries," said Luke Butterworth, the founder of Better Venu. "A lot of the negotiation happens around the budget, the different components of it, and how we're breaking it out. That ended up being kind of the cornerstone for me — how much time we were spending going back and forth on that initial quote and how challenging and bespoke that initial quote typically is."
Better Venu aims to help business owners free up precious time for other matters, Butterworth told Taproot. He is working with some students from the University of Alberta, where he is the entrepreneur-in-residence for the Innovation, Creativity, Entrepreneurship incubator in the engineering faculty. Development is moving quickly thanks to advances in the large language models that fuel AI assistants such as Anthropic's Claude for coding.
"Some of these things that have taken me and other teams that I've worked with months to do (can now be done) in a matter of weeks, which is just crazy," he said. "The build velocity is really impressive now that there are tools like Claude."
His goal is to aggregate details on venues' pricing, capacity, amenities, availability, on-site services, proximity to hotels, and other criteria to expedite the booking process, ultimately allowing venues to generate instant quotes rather than going back and forth to tailor a rental package manually. To get there, he said, he needs venues to sign up and input their details.
"Better Venu is not like a Google search — it's much more like an OpenTable," Butterworth said. "You want to be much closer to the group to understand what they have to offer, what their preferences are, and what their willingness is to offer more or less in terms of discounting on certain days. What is their pricing stack, and how do they like to lay that out? How do they like to package with other vendors when they work with them?"
Better Venu is also meant to make life easier for consumers. Butterworth said the public-facing component is two-fold: widgets embedded on venue websites for people who know what they want to book, and quote comparisons between venues for those who are deciding.
"If you're trying to plan a last-minute wedding, that could be really difficult," he said of conventional booking processes. "You need to be able to look almost everywhere at once to find out who has availability, who can hit your budget range, and then how you can go ahead with that group. A lot of different variables come in pretty quickly, and so you end up asking that same set of questions to every single group concurrently."
Butterworth has more time to focus on developing Better Venu now that EPIC Market, which he co-founded with Jennifer Keith, has closed its food hall at Station Park on the corner of Gateway Boulevard and Whyte Avenue. The multi-level, multi-restaurant concept was open from August 2024 to the start of January this year.
"Operating at that corner was unfortunately a Herculean task without parking or foot traffic," reads a message posted to the EPIC Market website.
