Festicket, the UK site that aims to make booking and attending a music festival akin to the experience of purchasing a package holiday online, has raised $680k in a new round of funding.
Its new backers are the French early-stage fund Kima Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of vente-privee.com), London’s #1 Seed and Playfair Capital, and the New York-based VC firm Windcrest Partners.
Festicket says the new capital will be used to further develop the platform and extend the range of products that it’s able to offer, as well as to bolster sales and marketing, including key hires, and to accelerate its plans for European expansion.
Founded in early 2012 by Zacharie Sabban (CEO) and Jonathan Younes (CTO), Festicket wants to make attending festivals as easy as booking a package holiday. Users browse the curated directory of music festivals and, in a single purchase, can book a festival package — tickets, transport and accommodation — therefore eliminating much of the pain associated with attending festivals, which often involves dealing with multiple providers and a disparate itinerary. By consolidating this process, the broader aim is to open up the festival market to an even wider audience.
Partnering with more than 40 top music festivals across Europe, the startup makes money by taking a 20 percent commission on each part of the packages it sells (i.e. tickets, accommodation, transport, extras). It claims an average basket price of around €290, and says it has 27,000 active members of which 73% are from UK, France and Germany.

In addition to its consumer-facing site, Festicket has recently added a B2B element to its strategy by deepening its partnerships with festivals by offering packages directly on their official websites via a white-label version. It’s already helping to power the sites of the UK’s Camden Crawl festival, Denmark’s open air festival Roskilde, Monegros Desert Festival in Spain, Gnaoua in Morocco, and OFF Festival in Poland.
Prior to today’s newly announced investment, Festicket was funded by friends and family to the tune of £70k (~$105k), bringing the total raised by the London startup to approximately $785,000. Meanwhile, #1 Seed’s Raj Ramanandi has joined the company’s Board.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/q6WoLiWzXa8/
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