Event ticketing companies Amiando and Eventbrite get European backing
The online event-planning market is mature. Various event web sites have gotten bought, gone out of business, or gone nowhere in the last several years.
However, two companies, Amiando and EventBrite, allow you to sell tickets to events online, and they’ve emerged with a business model: They take a cut of the ticket sale. This differs them from the slew of other sites that helped you organize events, but never made money.
Notably, the two companies have just announced new rounds of venture funding.
The two companies fill the middle ground between the enormous task of building your own ticket-selling software (not very practical, obviously), and using a large-scale ticket-seller like Ticketmaster. In addition, they help you set up websites to promote those events.
Today, Amiando, a Munich, Germany-based service that says it has the “first mover” advantage in Europe, is announcing its first round of financing, from Wellington Partners and Adinvest.
Eventbrite, the San Francisco-based company that’s likely better known to our United States-based readers, announced its first, and undisclosed, round earlier this week from the European Founders Fund. Eventbrite’s chief executive is Kevin Hartz, an early advisor to Paypal and a repeat entrepreneur who is also the co-founder of angel investing outfit Youniversity.
Both services should be familiar to VentureBeat readers. We’re using EventBrite to sell tickets for our MobileBeat conference in July. Amiando, meanwhile, was the online ticket seller for the Crunchies awards that we co-hosted last January.
Amiando, which also offers a widget that lets you sell tickets on your own site, has been focusing on international expansion. Besides English, it already provides the service in German (of course), as well as Spanish and French. It recently announced a distribution partnership for the East Asian market with Web2Asia, a company that provides business development services for foreign companies looking to expand into Asia. The East Asian region, particularly China, has unsurprisingly shown impressive growth potential for events and related services that go along with general economic expansion. China’s event industry for example is growing 20 percent per year, with the second highest number of trade show visitors and exhibitors in the world, according to a 2007 report by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
Anthony Ha contributed to this article.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.