The two big secondary tickets marketplaces are now playing “anything you can do, I can do better” on the VC front. Seatwave has raised a $17 million (£10.5 million) fourth round from existing backers Atlas, Mangrove and Fidelity, led by new investor Accel. Atlas, which basically created the whole project together with CEO Joe Cohen, remains the largest shareholder, writes Atlas partner Fred Destin.
Seatwave raised seed and $3 million first-round funds from Atlas in 2006, $8 million from Mangrove and Atlas in 2007, then $25 million from Fidelity, Atlas, Mangrove, AdInvest and Holtzbrinck in February 2008, so is now operating on a big $53 million in venture investments. Rival Viagogo has totted up $70 million in same, including a $15 million round in February from Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and others. Each appears to be in a battle for a big exit to eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), just as Viagogo CEO Eric Baker accomplished with StubHub, or to LiveNation.
Transactions Seatwave processed in Q408 increased 66 percent on the previous three months, driven by demand for theatre tickets, and the site is keen to trumpet comScore’s March rankings, which found it’s Europe’s most-visited secondary ticketing site on 1.9 million unique users, on demand for Michael Jackson tickets.