FanSnap, the startup that we’ve likened to a Kayak for event ticket searches, has closed a $5.2 million funding round led by Highland Capital Partners. As part of the deal, Richard de Silva of Highland will be joining the company’s board of directors. The new round brings FanSnap’s total funding to over $15.7 million, after a $10 million Series A round from General Catalyst Partners last year.
FanSnap allows users to search dozens of ticket providers at once, including sites like StubHub, eBay, and RazorGator. The site now claims an index of 13,169,532 available tickets to 33,653 different events. The site goes well beyond standard price listings too — instead of simply showing a Craigslist-style list of available tickets, FanSnap offers a visual map showing off exactly where in a stadium each ticket corresponds to. It also shows how valuable each ticket is using using a color key and alerts users to tickets it deems to be the best buys.
For more, check out our full review of the service here.
THats a whole lotta moooolah. Hopefully it is put to good use.
That is a ton of money, I was checking out their crunchbase listing to try to get an idea of how much they have raised in total. Not sure. Crunchbase shows two series A entries of 5.5 and 5.0 both in 08. So is it possible that in 1.5 years they were heading back to the trough, and succeeded to the tune of around 10million?
Looking at the old article (Jason, wish you could have given us the key
This is a great service, with a great team behind it!
did they ever heard of ticketmaster, just like 80% of internet population??
Hi Daniel,
Yes, we’ve heard of Ticketmaster. The challenge for ticket buyers is there are a lot of places online to find tickets. So much so that it can be hard for fans to find the tickets they want when they want them.
That is the problem we working on solving — bring as many tickets together in one place as possible and make it dead simple for fans to see where the tickets are and how much they cost.
Our ticket search engine then connects the fan with the ticket provider to complete the transaction with as little friction as possible.
Most events are not sold out. Is it really that hard to find tickets?
Most of the desirable tickets for popular events are gone by the time the pre-sale and preferred credit card users get their hands on them. It’s not about simply finding tickets; Ticketmaster’s setup in particularly blows because they perform the search for the seat themselves after you go through extremely general filters (simply by price & general section, which does not allow for freedom in choosing positioning, such as left, right, or center, and it is horrible to use when you are looking to purchase tickets with someone else simultaneously and keep having to refresh the search until you stumble up tickets that are next to each other.
With that said, FanSnap has a great UI and the value feature is an extremely useful add-on.
For $15.7M that’s what you do? It really is about who you know and who you snow.
What do you need all that money for? It’s too much to simply grow the company. I wonder what other cool feature you are cooking….
These guys won’t succeed unless they do better in organic search.
They are in competition with every other ticket site out there because they need people going to their site first. The average person knows nothing about fansnap and the best way for them to find out is through search. Buying links is the only way to get it done. Maybe they will spend some of the $5 million on that?
Joe, we agree. Search is very important. We just came out of beta in March and search takes time. We’re focusing on building the best fan experience we can. We think the best marketing is having a great product. Product is where we’ll continue to focus.
Chris,
Totally agree search takes time but your 2300 incoming links in over a year in existence while spending nearly 10 million dollars really isn’t going to do anything for you. If your main focus is on product then you better plan on raising a lot more money to stay in the game until people can find you. Your developers and overpaying for adwords will bleed you guys dry.
First, I will pantomime a thoughtful comment on the company: “Wow, these guys have money that is represented by a digit with a lot of digits after it. Wow again! I think ill of them because they can’t build this website in their in-law’s garage for $4.39 dollars like the way that GE, Lotus Notes and my Awesome Site, “PimentoLoaf.com” were. By the way, Pimento is changing the way people do business and love on Earth. Because we have a great team.
Second: Thanks! I was wondering what site would be the Kayak of Tickets again. It is unclear to me which of the literally 5 sites your regularly knight the Kayak of Tickets is the actual Kayak of tickets? It is like I am playing a Clue! Can someone on your crack writing team to be the Kayak of the Kayaks of Tickets for me?
Note: I found five other sites: Tickex, TicketFlow, TicketStumbler, LiveKick and TicketDonkey using your search box and “Kayak of Tickets.” You know, the search box – it’s sort of the Kayak of Recycled Cliches.
i was just thinking of something like this.. great idea.. great money..