November 19, 2010
SeatGeek gets funded by angel Ashton Kutcher
Kutcher and partner Guy Oseary, both of A-Grade Investments, pump capital into ticket search site
SeatGeek, a ticket search site for sport, concert and theater events, has raised a strategic investment from celebrity-turned-angel Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary through their investment fund A-Grade Investments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.In 2010, the startup had raised $1.6 million in Series A funding from a long list of venture capital firms (Founder Collective, NYC Seed, Stage One Capital, Trisiras Group, PKS Capital) and angel investors (Arie Abecassis, Sunil Hirani, Thomas Lehrman, Allen Levinson and Mark Wachen).
After scouring the Web’s biggest third-party ticket sites (like StubHub, TicketNetwork, TicketsNow and TicketCity), SeatGeek presents users with the most comprehensive list of tickets at the best rates. Since you’re buying from resellers, tickets for many shows will be less expensive than face value. If you’re buying for a sold out show, however, you should expect to pay above face value.
SeatGeek also recently integrated with Fanvenues, which bills itself as the “Google of seat views for sports and concert fans.” Now, instead of just presenting ticket buyers with a 2D overhead plan of the venue, SeatGeek also enables users to actually see what the court or stage will look like from their seats.
The screenshot here shows what the American Airlines Arena court in Miami, Fla. would look like from section 120, row 18:
The company has secured a couple significant partnerships (with The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! Sports) and today added one more, with Bleacher Report. The online sports network, which sees 19 million visitors each month and boasts one million email subscribers, will use SeatGeek to power scores and schedule pages for all four professional sports as well as college football and basketball. It’s yet another major avenue for SeatGeek to reach a greater audience.
We previously covered one other addition to the A-Grade Investments portfolio, social shopping site Fashism. As a new fund created by Ashton Kutcher, A-Grade so far seems to be targeting consumer services.
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SeatGeek forecasts the price of sports and concert ticket on the secondary market, analogous to what Farecast (now Bing Travel) does for airline tickets. For ticket buyers this helps determine whether to buy a ticket immediately or wait for a price drop. For sellers it helps identify the optimal time to unload their tickets.
SeatGeek’s crawlers have compiled millions of ticket transactions and have also aggregated other factors that influence prices. SeatGeek's patent-pending technology uses this data to accurately predict prices.
SeatGeek offers a free version for buyers and will soon release a premium version for brokers and other sellers.
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