Vivenu, a ticketing platform that offers an API for venues and promoters to customize to their needs, has closed a $15 million (€12.6 million) Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital. Previous investor Redalpine also participated.
Historically speaking, most ticketing platform startups took a direct to consumer approach, or have provided turnkey solutions to big event promoters. But in this day and age, most events require a great deal more flexibility, not least because of the pandemic. So, by offering an API and allowing promoters that flexibility, vivenu managed to gain traction.
Venues and event owners get a full-featured ticketing, out-of-the-box platform with full real-time dynamic control over all aspects of selling tickets, including configuring prices and seating plans, leveraging customer data and insights and mastering a branded look and feel across their sales channels. It has exposed APIs enabling many different custom use cases for large international ticket sellers. Since its seed funding in March, the company says it has sold more than 2 million tickets.
Simon Hennes, CEO and co-founder of vivenu, said in a statement: “We created vivenu to address the need of ticket sellers for a user-centric ticketing platform. Event organizers were stuck with solutions that heavily depend on manual processes, causing high costs, dependencies, and frustration on various levels.”
Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Balderton, said: “Vivenu has built a sophisticated product and set of APIs that gives event organisers full control of their ticketing operations.”
Vivenu is also the first European investment of Aurum Fund LLC, the fund associated with the San Francisco 49ers. Also investing in the round are angels, including Sascha Konietzke (founder at Contentful), Chris Schagen (former CMO at Contentful), Sujay Tyle (founder at Frontier Car Group) and Tiny VC.
In March 2020, vivenu secured €1.4 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding to €14 million. Previous investors include early-stage venture capital investor Redalpine, GE32 Capital and Hansel LLC (associated with the founders of Loft).
Speaking to TechCrunch, Hennes said: “You have to send your seat map to Ticketmaster, and then the account manager comes back to you with a sitemap. This goes back and forth and takes ages. With us you have a seating chart designer basically integrated into the software which you can simply change yourself.”
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