Eventbrite Acquires London-Based Lanyrd and Latin American Events Company Eventioz

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 3, 2013) - Eventbrite, the global self-service ticketing platform, today announced it has acquired London-based event data company Lanyrd, and Argentinean-based ticketing company Eventioz. These acquisitions -- the first for the company -- will bring powerful product and technical assets to the leading events platform, as well as strong industry expertise in a new region, Latin America.

Together, these acquisitions directly reflect the areas of focus the company announced with its $60 million funding news in April: Accelerating international expansion; mobile growth and development; event discovery; and attracting top talent from around the world. This news also follows several senior leadership hires, and a March announcement that the platform had processed over $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales. Eventbrite has also processed 130 million tickets in 179 countries.

"For seven years, Eventbrite has focused on creating, scaling and promoting the best ticketing platform on the market. Now it's time for us to open our pocketbooks a bit to accelerate our growth around the world," said Kevin Hartz, Eventbrite Co-Founder and CEO. "These two acquisitions perfectly align with the strategic focus for the company, while adding significant assets and technical power to our platform."

Lanyrd
Lanyrd, a social conference directory based in London, allows users to add and discover events as well as track friends' professional event activity. The company was founded in 2010, and has helped nearly 40,000 events in 148 countries have a better and more social event experience. Specifically, Lanyrd's product allows speakers and attendees easy access to event information, slides and video of presentations in a seamless, cross-platform experience. The team also has impressive technology credentials, boasting the co-creator of the Django web framework, the creator of the Django data migration tool South who is also a Django core committer, and substantial expertise in mobile development. The Lanyrd team will relocate to Eventbrite's headquarters in San Francisco to be part of the 100+-strong engineering effort, as well as leverage their technical expertise to help Eventbrite speed innovation in the core platform and improve its mobile products. Eventbrite will continue to support Lanyrd.com and its community after the acquisition.

"Lanyrd is an incredibly impressive product and engineering team that has been continually innovating crowd sourced event data for three years. The team's efforts in tagging and structured data around live experiences is incredibly valuable to us as we dig further into event discovery, the buyer-seller experience and organizer analytics," said Pat Poels, vice president of engineering at Eventbrite. "Further, Eventbrite also will benefit from Lanyrd's mobile development and product expertise as we seek to make our own offerings the best in the world -- no matter what device you are using. Finally, since Eventbrite uses the Django framework, having the co-creator on board as well as other leaders in Django and the open source movement will up our game and help us attract the best talent."

"The Eventbrite team shares the same passion for live events that drove us to create Lanyrd in the first place," said Natalie Downe, co-founder of Lanyrd. "We are thrilled to join a company with such strong engineering talent and believe we can contribute significantly to its product." Co-Founder Simon Willison continues, "Both companies believe in the power of shared experiences and we look forward to being part of an effort to use technology to improve how we discover and enjoy live events."

Eventioz
Eventioz is a Latin American ticketing platform with operations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Since the business started in 2008, it has helped more than 15,000 organizers create, promote and sell tickets to nearly 20,000 events. Eventioz is operated by an impressive, cross-functional team with substantial experience both in and outside of the event industry. Eventioz was co-founded by a successful serial entrepreneur and a world-class engineer who has historically been one of the top code contributors to the Ruby on Rails web framework.

"While there are a lot of country-specific competitors to Eventbrite throughout the world, Eventioz has built one of the few truly cross-border platforms," said Randy Befumo, vice president strategy at Eventbrite. "Further, Eventioz covers an impressive array of payment alternatives in a region where traditional credit cards and bank accounts do not offer much advantage. This will allow Eventbrite to enter multiple markets simultaneously with the right mix of local language, local customer support and payment alternatives. We think this is a team that can drive tremendous growth and look forward to putting our knowledge and capital behind them with the goal of winning across Latin America."

"With Eventbrite, we get to help the leading self-service ticketing platform expand its global reach," said Pablo Aquistapace, co-founder of Eventioz. "Personally, I also am excited to work with the Eventbrite team, and am particularly honored that someone as experienced at identifying great companies and management teams as Kevin Hartz has asked us to join his company. We think that with Eventbrite's support, we will be the leader in the Latin American market in short order, as well as contributing to the development of the platform globally."

These acquisitions crown a year of rapid growth for Eventbrite. In Q2, Eventbrite announced that it had processed over 100 million tickets across 179 countries, totaling more than $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales. One-third of those ticket sales had occurred within the previous 9 months. The company also announced in March that it had doubled the total number of tickets processed -- to 100 million -- since February 2012. These milestones confirm the large, underpenetrated and global market for ticketing as well as the universal need for an easy-to-use and scalable platform for event organizers and attendees around the world.

About Eventbrite:
Eventbrite enables people all over the world to plan, promote, and sell out any event, and has sold 130 million tickets worldwide. The online event registration service makes it easy for everyone to discover events, and to share the events they are attending with the people they know. In this way, Eventbrite brings communities together by encouraging people to connect through live experiences. Eventbrite's investors include DAG Ventures, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price, Tenaya Capital and Tiger Global. Learn more at www.eventbrite.com.