Seatwave, the company we founded with Joe Cohen to go after the secondary ticketing market, announced today its Series B funding for $8M. I wrote about it in the past and so did Vecosys.
We are very pleased to welcome Mangrove's Mark Tluszcz as lead investor for the round as well as Oliver Jung, a well known German angel who invested in StudiVZ and Xing among others. If you don't know Mangrove you should. There is much more to these guys than the Skype story and they are (in our view) clearly a key emerging manager in the European landscape.
Joe is a case study for "operating guy turned entrepreneur". He keeps telling us we should get more senior execs out of the likes of IAC to become founders, not realising he is the exception and not the rule. Joe is ex Citikey, Ticketmaster online and #2 at Match.com.
Since we started talking to Joe in February last he has put together a highly coherent and high quality team of 25, built and launched the service and demonstrated that having more cash is not the key to building a
succesful service. We did a discrete launch in December and already have more than 400,000 tickets on sale, 20 times as many as available on eBay. According to Hitwise’s April statistics, Seatwave is already in the top 15 of all websites selling entertainment tickets and leads all other online ticket exchanges. We have a highly funded and agressive competitor in Viagogo, but on today's indicators we are convinced we can take this market.
It's also a good case study for what we at Atlas Venture call "rolling your own": studying an opportunity, meeting current market players, deciding to do our own, marrying talent to the idea and executing the hell out of it. Inside Atlas the deal is primarily my colleague's Sonali de Rycker, but it was a typical team effort.
We are also very keen to work with the industry to do this in a way that is aligned with both fans and talent. From the press release: "Seatwave champions the cause of cleaning up the ticketing business and has engaged with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to increase
protection for ticket buyers. Seatwave has already gone beyond the measures recommended by the DCMS to increase protection for consumers and calls for all other agents to do the same. Recently, Seatwave has
been invited to provide expert testimony to the Parliamentary Committee looking at ticket touting in the UK."
Last words to Mark Tluszcz: “In the short time Seatwave has been operating, it has proven the massive demand for a service such as this and established itself as the most popular service in Europe. The management team is by far the best in the market. We are excited to be on board.” Glad you decided to join us !!
Technorati Tags: seatwave, mangrove, oliverjung, joecohen, marktluszcz, viagogo
hopefully the 8m helps them get more inventory. also since all of these ops are a copy of stubhub.com in the US (so lets stop the backslapping) - you might as well copy some of their nav features like the "Stadium/Arena" rollover function so that i can visually pick my tickets. giving me "ticketmaster" like functionality does not float the boat.
Posted by: ming666 | June 29, 2007 at 07:39 AM
Hey Yakov thanks for the comment, we are really glad to be doing a deal with Mangrove and joining the families ! If you are in London and want to meet with Joe at any point LMK.
Posted by: Fred Destin | June 11, 2007 at 06:20 AM
Great deal! Kudos to Joe and Mark!
Posted by: Yakov | June 11, 2007 at 05:01 AM
And you may like to check out my interview with Joe over at http://tbites.com/2007/06/videocast-interview-with-seatwave
Posted by: Mike Butcher | June 08, 2007 at 05:28 AM
Great move. It's an excellent market and we need cleaner experience so U-lik can be a real dealer. I'm ready to go far for one of my Hall of fame ... Already thinking about going to london for the Prince concerts in september (which i didn't knew about before trying seatwave).
Hope you feel better.
Posted by: leafar | June 05, 2007 at 09:56 AM
Fred --
Saw your post, and great to see the secondary ticket market thriving, but I noticed an inaccuracy. You forgot to mention the largest secondary ticket exchange site in the UK -- MyTicketMarket -- who, according to the same Hitwise rankings, were #5 of all websites selling tickets in the UK.
Andrew Blachman
CEO
Advanced Ticket Systems Limited (operators of MyTicketMarket.com and GetMeIn.com)
Posted by: Andrew Blachman | June 04, 2007 at 01:06 PM