Startup SeatGeek, who’s site forecasts event tickets prices to help you know exactly when and where to buy, raised between $500k and $1M in a Series A financing according to TechCrunch.
Made in NYC, SeatGeek’s offices are located in the heart of Silicon Alley at 447 Broadway and the round was lead by four NYC angel investors: Sunil Hirani (founder of Creditex, an online derivatives market that was acquired for $625M in 2008), Mark Wachen (founder of Optimost, an enterprise multivariate testing app acquired for $52M three years ago), Arie Abecassis (former President of MindFire) and Allen Levinson (former MD of Moody’s KMV). SeatGeek was previously incubated in and received a seed round of $20k from Philly based DreamIt Ventures.
SeatGeek is basically a vertical search engine that searches hundreds of secondary market websites every day to aggregate all the information relevant to event ticket pricing, including ticket list prices, days of week and even the weather. It crunches that info into predictive pricing intelligence and layers that on top of listings and interactive seating charts to give you a comprehensive listing service that is also smart enough to tell when and where to buy to get the best deal. If you are too lazy or busy to keep checking back on the site, SeatGeek will send you alerts when tickets hit what their systems deems the lowest price.
So how does SeatGeek make money? Buyers can use the service for free and tickets brokers and other sellers get a premium (aka paid) service. SeatGeek also gets 7 to 10% of ticket sales where it has affiliate relationships with ticket brokers. They’re also preparing the roll-out of a ‘ticket insurance’ product, where users get compensated if SeatGeek doesn’t provide accurate forecasts.
SeatGeek has forecasts for about 5,000 events and claims a 82% forecast accuracy rate for all new events, which uses a database of historical ticket prices that has grown to over 11 million sales in the past few months.
SeatGeek was founded by Josh Groetzinger and Russ D’Souza, who also co-founded Scribnia and Evolving Vox together. Assuming they didn’t raise any additional funding between the round from DreamIt and this A round, Josh and Russ have accomplished quite a bit with very little. It will be interesting to see how far they get with this next traunch of funding, most of which they plan to use for hiring. Not surprisingly, it looks like most of the hiring will be focused on hiring engineers from the New York tech community by the looks of the open positions posted on their jobs page!
Our prediction for SeatGeek? Chances are it gets scoped up by one of the leading online ticket sites like TicketMaster or StubHub within a year or two. Only time will tell how accurate our predictions are!
