Seatwave, the UK-based upstart behind the eponymous marketplace for secondary tickets, has landed $17 million in Series D funding led by Accel Partners with Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners, Fidelity Ventures and Adinvest joining the round, writes Atlas partner Fred Destin on his blog.
Recently named Europe’s fastest growing digital media company by investment bank GP Bullhound, Seatwave allows fans to trade theatre, sport and music tickets online and thus competes (hard) with TicketMaster (IAC), StubHub (eBay) and that other well-funded startup in the ticket reselling space, Viagogo.
So Viagogo has raised another $15 million and hooked in former tennis champions Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf both as board members / investors as well as advisors to help it push its secondary ticketing market into Europe. The funding now gives it $70 million of external investment. That’s some war-chest.
Agassi and Graf invested in the common-stock round alongside existing shareholders Index Ventures, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA; German media mogul Herbert Kloiber; and international financier Jacob Rothschild, via his family’s interests. The new funding values Viagogo at more than $300 million, although I hear from sources that they were aiming for a $30 million round.
The company currently serves ticket seekers in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands. Founder Eric Baker says Viagogo has annual sales close to a $100 million annually and expects those figures to double or triple this year. Viagogo, which charges buyers a 10% fee and sellers a 15% fee on each confirmed transaction, handled $100 million in transactions in 2008.
London-based Viagogo, an online marketplace for event tickets, is invading the U.S. market. It’s a European version of StubHub, which sold to eBay for $307 million back in January.
The site was founded by Eric Baker, one of StubHub’s founders, and launched in 2005 after a falling out with the company. Baker is now returning to the US market to take on StubHub, with a fresh $30 million coming from a series C round led by Index Ventures. Other participating investors included LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault, German media mogul Dr. Herbert Kloiber, and international financier Lord Jacob Rothschild. The company has a total of $50 million in financing.
For their US launch, they’ve closed a deal with the Cleaveland Browns to be the official secondary ticket provider. The deal, however, comes on the heels of StubHub’s larger exclusive deal to be the MLB’s official online ticket resale marketplace.
Viagogo still has a larger presence in Europe, making exclusive ticketing deals with a number of Europe’s top teams, including Manchester United, Chelsea Football Club and Bayern Munich. Baker’s previous experience at Viagogo seems to be helping. The company claims to be generating more revenue in June, its tenth month in operation, than StubHub did in its first 15 months combined.
Viagogo makes money by adding a 10 percent service charge to ticket prices for buyers and takes a 15 percent service charge to sellers. So, a ticket listed for $100 costs a buyer $110, with $85 going to the seller. StubHub follows the same pricing structure.
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