Ticketing company Eventbrite is announcing what it says are the first two acquisitions in its seven-year history — London-based event data company Lanyrd and Latin American ticketing service Eventioz.
Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Kevin Hartz said the company has “traditionally had an organic mindset with an aversion to acquisitions — we really wanted to build everything in-house.” Now, however — thanks in part to $60 million in new funding raised earlier this year — he said Eventbrite is at “the stage and size to be acquisitive,” with “an appetite” to expand geographically and technologically.
Hartz praised both the Lanyard and Eventioz teams, but he said each company brings something besides talent — Lanyrd will allow Eventbrite to incorporate more structured data into its listings (for example, Hartz suggested that by integrating with Lanyrd, Eventbrite might eventually be able to automatically provide event organizers with speaker data), while Eventioz will give Eventbrite a foothold for Latin American expansion.
“We certainly looked at pure talent acquisitions and we’re not averse to those,” he added.
Lanyrd was founded in 2010 and raised $1.4 million in funding from Index Ventures Seed, PROfounders Capital, Y Combinator, Start Fund, and others. The team will move to Eventbrite’s San Francisco headquarters, and Hartz said his company will continue to support the Lanyrd service and community.
As for bringing Lanyrd data into Eventbrite (Lanyrd has supposedly been used to help nearly 40,000 events in 148 countries, and it hosts more than 72,000 speaker profiles), he said, “We have no dates to report, but we plan to start pushing things out as soon as possible. It’s more an incremental change versus a flip being switched.”
Eventioz, meanwhile, was founded in 2008, has raised $1.5 million from Kaszek Ventures, and is headquartered in Mendoza, Argentina. It will continue to operate in Latin America, with what Hartz said will be “as smooth a transition as possible” to Eventbrite’s technical architecture. He added that he’s definitely hoping to expand the team with more hires: “There’s a lot of great engineering talent available. There hasn’t been a pleasant macroeconomic environment, so building engineering resources down there to is very interesting to us.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/SqRSo4hn3Ns/
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