Eventbrite raises $6.5 million

San Francisco ticketing startup seeing success by letting anyone sell tickets to their own event

Eventbrite, an online event organization and ticketing service, announced it has raised $6.5 million.  The Series C round comes from Sequoia Capital.  Previous investors include Bebo co-founders Michael & Xochi Birch, Jeff Clavier, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, former PayPal founding executives, David Sacks and Keith Rabois, prolific Silicon Valley angel, Ron Conway, and Flixster co-founders Saran Chari and Joe Greenstein.  The company has raised over $8 million to date.

The San Francisco-based startup is quite different from ticketing sites like Ticketmaster or Tickets.com.  Instead of focusing on mainstream arena concerts and sporting events, Eventbrite lets anybody set up an event for free.  

"With Eventbrite, we've branched out from the 'old world' model of ticket registration and democratized it, empowering anyone with the ability to sell a ticket to an event and bring people together," said Kevin Hartz, CEO and co-founder of Evenbrite. "We see a massive opportunity here in terms of the socialization and optimization of events and are excited to play an enabling role in making this happen."

For example, Vator recently launched a set of classes called the Vator Academy, and the event is being organized through Eventbrite.  There, the academy is detailed and tickets for the classes can also be purchased.  Potential buyers can pay with the standard credit cards or a Google checkout account.  When somebody purchases a ticket, Eventbrite takes a 2.5% transaction fee plus a dollar fee per ticket.

The service also integrates with all the social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace.  

And Eventbrite has been seeing success with this mold.  Founded in 2006, the company said it's seen triple-digit year over year growth, 3 million monthly uniques, and projected ticket sales of over $100 million in 2009.  Some notable names that have made use of its services include TechCrunch, Craigslist Foundation, PayPal and Mashable. 

Image source - Flickr