Aisleworking name

Investor deck · seed · 2026

Founding-investor deck

The wedding your couple plans by talking to it.

Aisle is an AI-native wedding platform for South Africa. One chat agent plans, builds and coordinates the whole wedding: venues, website, invites, seating, budget and DJ. We are raising a small seed to ship the MVP and prove couples will pay, on top of infrastructure we already own.

💰 two-sided revenue 🇺🇦 ZA-first, global-capable ♻ 60% of the hard build already done 🔥 no incumbent has shipped this

Scroll to walk the deck

01 / 09

The problem

Planning a wedding is still tabs, forms and chased quotes.

Couples juggle a dozen tools and a dozen vendor threads. The software that exists is a filing cabinet: it stores your wedding, it does not do anything. And in South Africa the good tools are not even localised.

Every couple already talks to AI. The expectation has shifted from "give me a form" to "just handle it." Nobody in weddings has answered that.

59%

of couples call planning "overwhelming" even though 90% say digital tools are indispensable.

74%

blow their budget. It is the biggest stressor, and the tool that owned it retired its tracker.

AI-native, full-stack wedding platforms serving South Africa. No Zola or Knot localisation.

02 / 09

The solution

One agent. Real actions. You approve, it does the work.

Not a search box or a chatbot bolted onto a dashboard. Every message the couple sends can change something real, and the agent handles the busywork end to end.

plan

Finds the venue

Matches venues to budget and criteria from a live, self-updating directory. Shortlists, compares, books the viewing.

build

Builds the website

Describe it, the agent builds the wedding site on a real domain we host, and edits it by chat.

coordinate

Runs the day

Guests, approve-first invites, constraint-solved seating, budget tracking, and a live DJ playlist handoff.

Two of these, nobody executes well: seat-level conflict-solved seating (keep the divorced parents apart) and a true couple-to-guest-to-DJ playlist handoff. That is where Aisle wins, not on commodity registry or RSVP.

03 / 09

How it works · the stack

A tool-calling agent over integrations we already run.

Couple chats → Aisle AI agent → calls the right tool

Website builder

Chat-to-build wedding site on a hosted domain.

our existing editor

Seating engine

Constraint solver for seat-level conflicts.

built in-house

Venue discovery

Find and match venues, self-updating directory.

Google Places / Yelp

DJ playlist

Couple and guests build it, DJ gets a live link.

Spotify API

Invites and RSVP

Drafts, chases, sends on approval.

our email infra

Budget brain

Tracks spend vs plan, warns on overruns.

built in-house

Payments and tokens

Package checkout and AI usage top-ups.

PayFast

Hosting and domains

Every wedding is a hosted site and domain.

our cPanel infra

The agent, seating engine and budget brain are the net-new build. Everything else we already operate for other products. That is why our build cost and risk are a fraction of a from-scratch startup's.

04 / 09

The market

Big, recurring, emotional spend, with no AI-native leader here.

TAM · total wedding spend, South Africa

R27bn / year (SABIA), planning segment ~16% CAGR

All money spent on SA weddings annually. Global wedding market is about $344bn.

SAM · digitally-addressable

~R600m / year

SA couples who would buy a digital plan, website and agent, plus the vendor spend to reach them. Estimated at ~120k formal weddings per year and blended addressable value per wedding.

SOM · realistic 3-year capture

R6m to 15m / year

1 to 3% of SA weddings on the couple package plus vendor subscriptions. A beachhead, before any regional or global expansion.

market sizes are estimates from public industry data; SAM and SOM derived from stated assumptions, to be tightened in diligence.

05 / 09

Business model

Two-sided, and the couple side pays from day one.

Side A · couples

R2 500 to 4 500

Once-off wedding package: live website, hosting and domain, and the AI agent with an included token allowance. Sold as a deliverable, not a subscription.

Side B · vendors

R400 to 1 200 / mo

Venues, photographers and DJs pay to sit on the agent's recommended list and receive matched, qualified couple leads. Grown once couples exist.

Usage · tokens

R99 / R199

The agent runs on LLM tokens. The package includes an allowance; heavy planners top up in-app. Usage is upside, not a cost leak.

Unit economics: a R2 500 to 4 500 package against roughly R300 to 600 direct cost per couple (tokens, domain, payment fee, support) is a strong gross margin, before any vendor revenue on top.

06 / 09

Why us

We start at 60%, not zero.

This is the crux of the case. A generic startup burns a year and most of a raise building the boring, hard infrastructure. We already run it as a live business.

Lovable-style site editor, already built and selling.
cPanel hosting and automated domain provisioning, live.
Per-service transactional email, live.
PayFast payments, already integrated elsewhere.

So the raise buys product and go-to-market, not plumbing.

The net-new work is the agent brain, the seating engine and the budget module, plus wiring the existing tools as agent actions. A focused, fundable build, not a moonshot.

The moat compounds: an agent UX incumbents cannot easily copy (they are locked into legacy forms), owning hosting-to-planner in one bill, and a ZA beachhead the global players ignore.

07 / 09

Roadmap

From validation to a two-sided platform.

Month 0

Validate the price

Structured interviews with real SA couples to confirm willingness to pay. The one thing money cannot skip.

Month 1-2

Lean demo slice

Chat agent, constraint seating, hosted site, one RSVP flow. Enough to sell the magic and land first paying couples.

Month 2-6

Market-ready MVP

Budget, DJ portal, payments and tokens, security and POPIA, basic vendor listings. Charge real couples.

Month 6-10

Two-sided at depth

Venue discovery and self-updating directory, vendor lead marketplace, analytics, registry and cash funds. Turn on high-margin vendor revenue.

Beyond

Expand

Regional rollout, then adjacent events (engagements, parties), lifting the short-LTV ceiling of a single wedding.

08 / 09

What it costs us to build

Internal cost, not a client quote.

An external client would be quoted R380k to 1.1M, with agency margin. For an investor funding equity, the real figure is our internal build cost, far lower because we reuse infrastructure and the founder builds.

Build scenario	Market-ready MVP	Full platform
Client price (external quote, with margin)	R380k to 560k	R750k to 1.1M
Internal cost, contractors at cost	R150k to 250k	R350k to 500k
Internal cash, founder-built (sweat equity)	R40k to 120k	R120k to 250k

In the founder-built case the cash burn is mostly LLM and API credits, infra, PayFast, legal and POPIA setup, and a little contract help. The rest is founder time, the sweat equity being traded, not cash spent.

09 / 09

The ask

Seed round

We are raising a founding round.

R300k to 600k

For equity plus a strategic partner. This is not the R1.1M build quote, that only applies to a hand-it-over client build. This buys the MVP, runway to prove the model, and a first go-to-market push.

Build to MVP

Agent, seating, budget, plus wiring the existing stack. ~R150k.

6 to 9 months runway

Founder focus, infra, tokens, legal and POPIA. ~R200k.

Go-to-market

Vendor recruitment, couple acquisition, brand. ~R100k.

Valuation and equity split are a separate conversation driven by traction and how much control the founder keeps. Happy to walk a dilution range in person.