Member News | Tickitto close $700k pre-seed round

SETsquared Bath member and University of Bath alumni, Dana Lattouf, founder and CEO of Tickitto, has shared some extremely exciting funding news with us this month.

Dana Lattouf - CEO Tickitto

Tickitto, a U.K. travel tech company that aims to help travel retailers access tickets to events and travel-related experiences through one single connection, has closed a $700 K pre-seed round led by Seedcamp.

The events and experiences category now represents the third-largest travel segment worldwide and is growing faster than the overall travel market. Despite that, the space is highly fragmented and composed of suppliers or reservation platforms that often focus their efforts on specific genres and/or geographies.

What is more, these products often have very little in common with each other in terms of product attributes, unlike flights and hotels. While this diversity in many ways can be seen as a strength to the category, it also represents a significant challenge for travel retailers when it comes to actually aggregating and retailing these unrelated products online.

This means that developers currently need to build out many integrations to access tickets to events and experiences across different genres and geographies. Additionally, they need to standardise the underlying data structure, including how these products are categorised in order to aggregate and make them available to the customers of travel retailers.

Tickitto aims to carry out a lot of that heavy-lifting on behalf of travel retailers and to do this once and for all by standardising the infrastructure and offering configurable front-end interfaces. With a few lines of code, any developer can tap into the ticket supply and start building a fantastic ticket buying experience on their platform. 

"The API environment in this space is still in its infancy, and there is a huge opportunity for innovation in this multi-billion dollar industry," says Dana Lattouf, founder and CEO. 

Travel retailers will not only limit what can be large up-front development costs but will be able to earn additional revenue through commission on those tickets. With COVID-19 hitting the travel space significantly, travel retailers are inevitably focused on their recovery plans, which includes how supporting ancillary revenue streams can help drive future revenues. Dana tells us:

"Tickets for theatre, music, sport and the arts can be easily overlooked during the trip but are essential to our enjoyment. In fact, it is those events and activities that motivate us to pack our bags and go. 

One would naturally think that acquiring ticket supply is relatively straightforward and made available by plugging into an API. We realised this is not the case, and that many platforms still run on legacy infrastructure, making the integration work labour-intensive.

Our aim is to work with major ticketing platforms, sports rights holders, event organisers and experience suppliers to modernise the infrastructure and build external collaboration capabilities to scale their reach. This will enable us to find new ways to serve today's modern traveller and make it simpler to deliver a connected trip experience via their preferred travel retailer’s platform.

So that when you are booking your flights to LA in April, you can also buy tickets to an event at Staples Center or an LA Galaxy home game from the same platform".

Tom Wilson, Investment Partner at Seedcamp said,

"When we first met the Tickitto team, we were amazed by their deep understanding of this space and passion for solving the problems they saw in the market. Spending more time with the team, it is clear they have the founder-market fit that we look for. We are excited to lead Tickitto's pre-seed round and support them on their mission to transform the infrastructure that underpins how tickets to events and experiences are sold and distributed."

Tickitto has already partnered up with some of the biggest names in the world of entertainment, tours, and activities. The company intends to use the funds to scale its engineering team, build out its go-to-market capabilities, as well as expand its supply and distribution network.