NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) — Event management and ticketing platform Eventbrite filed for an initial public offering with Securities and Exchange Commission.
In the regulatory filing with the SEC, Eventbrite stated that they are seeking to raise approximately $200 million in the IPO, though that figure is likely a placeholder.
Founded in 2006, the company was one of the first and is now the dominant event management platform in the U.S. The company maintains its headquarters in San Francisco and has local offices in Nashville, London, Cork, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, Melbourne, Mendoza, and São Paulo.
In their SEC filing, Eventbrite listed Live Nation as their key competitor, and offered insight into their finances, including revenue for the first six months of the year that rose to $142.1 million up from $88.2 million, while net losses rose to $15.6 million from $8.3 million for the same period in 2017.
Eventbrite, which is led by co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz, charges for tickets sold through the service for events such as concerts, fundraisers, seminars, and classes. In 2017, more than 700,000 creators issue approximately 203 million tickets across three million events in over 170 countries, the company said.
In addition to the primary Eventbrite brand, the company also operates ticketing service Ticketfly, which they acquired from Pandora in 2017 for $200 million and the Spanish ticketing service Ticketea, which they acquired in April for an undisclosed sum.
Ticketfly in particular, was in the news earlier this year, but not in a way that made anyone at Eventbrite happy. In May, Ticketfly’s systems were hacked, leaving numerous client websites offline for an extended period of time. The hackers threatened to release confidential databases purloined from Ticketfly, and the company said that the breach affected 26 million users, and included data about their names, addresses, and phone numbers.
