Event ticketing startup Eventbrite has raised a new round of funding at around $50 million, Fortune’s Dan Primack reports, which values the company at over $1 billion and sees the tech company join an elite group of so-called “Unicorn club” startups. The new funding comes on the heels of a $60 million round raised nearly a year ago, and Primack says that while the startup wasn’t necessarily looking to raise more ahead of a potential IPO in 2014, investors from that round made an offer that was too good to pass up.
The investors in question are Tiger Global Management and T. Rowe Price, both of which wanted more interest in Eventbrite and approached the startup with a deal, according to a statement provided by Eventbrite to Fortune confirming the new round. Other existing investors didn’t participate, in order to provide as much stake as possible to Tiger Global Management and T. Rowe Price, and one of Fortune’s sources also says the investors would’ve added more to the funding total had they been allowed to do so by Eventbrite.
The worldwide ticketing is a big cash cow – over $1 billion in gross ticket sales passed through Eventbrite’s platform last year alone, and online ticketing in the U.S. alone was estimated to be around a $4 billion business as of February last year. But Eventbrite is thinking globally, and in fact, Fortune reports that international expansion is one of the key goals of this new, late round, alongside product development on both the event organizer and consumer side of its platform.
This will push the startup’s big plans to go public back to 2015, Primack suggests. The company was founded in 2006 by Renaud Visage, and Kevin and Julia Hartz, and has raised a total of $190 million with this new round included. The $1 billion in ticketing sales it did in 2013 alone represents a massive surge in growth, since in March 2013, the startup announced that it has done $1.5 billion in cumulative ticket sales over the course of its whole seven year history. We’ve reached out to Eventbrite for more info and will update if we receive any response.
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