Mangrove Capital Partners and Atlas Venture
back UK’s largest fan-to-fan ticket exchange
Strictly Embargoed until 4. June 2007
London, 4 June 2007: Seatwave, the UK’s largest fan-to-fan ticket exchange, has today announced it has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by Mangrove Capital Partners (Mangrove).
Mangrove, the first institutional investor in Skype – still Europe’s most successful internet exit - is joined by founding investor Atlas Venture, which provided $3m Series A funding for Seatwave in May 2006. Oliver Jung, one of Germany’s most successful early stage business angels, who was among the first investors in university social networking site StudiVZ and networking site OpenBC, now known as Xing, also invested in the firm.
Mark Tluszcz, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Mangrove will join the Seatwave Board. The funding will be used to expand the team and enlarge the geographical base of the company.
Based in London, Seatwave is the UK’s largest fan-to-fan ticket exchange. Operating in a safe and secure environment, fans are able to buy and sell tickets for concerts, theatre, sports and any other live event. Seatwave was launched in February 2007 by Joe Cohen, ex Ticketmaster and ex match.com and already has more than 400,000 tickets on sale, 20 times as many as available on eBay. According to Hitwise’s April statistics, Seatwave is already in the top 15 of all websites selling entertainment tickets and leads all other online ticket exchanges.
Joe Cohen, Founder and CEO of Seatwave commented, “We are delighted to be working with some of the leading internet investors in Europe. We are passionate about building a strong marketplace for tickets, offering our customers the safest as well the most competitive environment for them to buy tickets to all types of events. In a very short time we’ve become the number one ticket exchange in the UK and we hope to soon expand across Europe.”
Seatwave champions the cause of cleaning up the ticketing business and has engaged with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to increase protection for ticket buyers. Seatwave has already gone beyond the measures recommended by the DCMS to increase protection for consumers and calls for all other agents to do the same. Recently, Seatwave has been invited to provide expert testimony to the Parliamentary Committee looking at ticket touting in the UK.
Mark Tluszcz, Mangrove Partners said, “In the short time Seatwave has been operating, it has proven the massive demand for a service such as this and established itself as the most popular service in Europe. The management team is by far the best in the market. We are excited to be on board.”
The secondary ticket market is primarily an informal market characterised by ticket touts at venues and people and touts selling on eBay. It is currently estimated to be worth around £1bn in the UK alone - £3.5-5bn Europe wide.
1 Dow Jones News
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Notes for editors
About Seatwave
Seatwave is the UK’s largest fan-to-fan ticket exchange, an online marketplace for buying and selling tickets for theatre, sports, music and other live events. The company was launched in February 2007 by Joe Cohen, ex Ticketmaster and ex match.com and early stage Venture Capital firm, Atlas Venture. Seatwave has more than 400,000 tickets on sale at any one time, 20 times more than eBay. Seatwave guarantees that tickets come only from legitimate sources and will represent them accurately and honestly. Seatwave operates two types of customer protection. TicketintegrityTM guarantees that buyers will receive the tickets they ordered and in good time for the event. If not Seatwave refunds 150% of what was paid. All tickets bought on Seatwave are also covered by TicketcoverTM This provides for a full refund if an event is cancelled and even covers buyers for a range of circumstances that may prevent them from attending their performance. The company is based in London.
www.seatwave.com
About Mangrove Capital Partners
Mangrove Capital Partners "Mangrove" provides venture capital with a punch to entrepreneurs looking to build world class companies. Our mission is to help turn visions into realities by providing financing, thoughtful advice, relevant experience and deep industry relationships to our portfolio companies. Mangrove has invested in, among others, the following companies: Skype (
http://www.skype.com), Securewave (
http://www.securewave.com), Dialcom Networks (
http://www.dialcom.com), Nimbuzz (
http://www.nimbuzz.com), Properazzi (
http://www.properazzi.com), Quintura (
http://www.quintura.com), and Piczo (
http://www.piczo.com).
To learn more about Mangrove Capital Partners, please visit
www.mangrove-vc.com.
About Atlas Venture
Atlas Venture is a leading early-stage venture capital firm that invests in technology and life sciences companies. Since inception in 1980, Atlas has helped build over 300 companies in more than 16 different countries. In the past decade, 44 portfolio companies have been acquired and 47 are now public companies with an aggregate market capitalization of over $15 billion. The firm is currently investing from its seventh fund and manages over $2.5 billion in committed capital.
For more information, please visit
www.atlasventure.com.
About Oliver Jung
Oliver Jung is a serial entrepreneur and private venture capital investor. He specializes in private equity investments in seed and early-stage Internet companies including investments in Adconion Media Group (investor), e-Puls.pl (investor), exxeta GmbH (chairman and investor), Imagekind.com (investor), OpenBC AG (investor), Smava.de (investor), StudiVZ Ltd. (sold to Holtzbrinck), Webnews.de (investor), Imedo.de (investor), Netmoms.de (investor), Nimbuzz.com (investor), trivago.de (investor), FamilyOne.de (investor), Kyte.tv (investor) and Lokalisten GmbH (investor).
Mr. Jung studied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe. He subsequently founded entory AG, an IT and e-commerce software consulting company, which was sold to the German Stock Exchange (Deutsche Börse) in 2001. Subsequent to the sale of entory AG, Mr. Jung served on the Board of Deutsche Börse Systems. He is a co-founder and chairman of exxeta GmbH, an e-commerce and IT consulting company operating throughout Germany and in Switzerland.
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