Home run! TicketRev scores $1.1M of funding, launches mobile app

By Riley Kaminer

It’s a South Florida success story still very much in the making.

Jason Shatsky returned to his hometown of Boca Raton after studying entrepreneurship at Babson College. He came back with a dream: scale ticket selling platform TicketRev. Now, Shatsky and team are two steps closer to bringing this vision to life.

For one, TicketRev this week announced that it has closed a $1.1 million pre-seed fundraise from 500 Startups, Soma Capital, Groove Capital, Techstars, the Minnesota Twins, and various angel investors. With this funding, TicketRev will expand its engineering and marketing teams to support the company’s growth.

Second, it has just launched its mobile app. According to the company, the app is aimed at making the ticket buying process easier than ever.

TicketRev has a unique offering. Through its platform, fans name their price and preferred seating location for an event. Then, ticket sellers and teams can review and accept these requests – enabling them to liquidate unsold inventory. The idea is that this buyer-first approach will create a transparent marketplace that is ultimately more efficient for buyers and sellers alike. It also has a reduced seller fee of 8.5%, and buyers never pay a fee.

“Our new funding will help us to continue empowering more people to save money when they buy tickets. We recognize that coming out of a pandemic, live events bring people together and we want to help make tickets more accessible,” TicketRev co-founder and CEO Jason Shatsky said in a statement.

“In 2022, there were 350% more concerts compared to 2019. People love going to events but hate the process of buying tickets,” Shatsky continued. “We want to make that easier, fairer, and more affordable.”

“The power of TicketRev lies in its ability to align incentives between all the involved stakeholders — buyers, sellers, teams, and venues — to create a win-win situation for everyone,” said Fouad Farhat, an investor at Soma Capital.

“The vision of TicketRev is clear: to become the go-to platform for live event tickets,” Farhat explained. “This new funding will allow the TicketRev team to expand nationally by onboarding new brokers, teams, and venues that are tired of empty seats, unsold inventory, and poor customer experience.”

This last year has been a whirlwind for the TicketRev team. It all started when the company won a Babson pitch competition at eMerge Americas, taking home $100,000 in winnings.

“That was an unbelievable experience,” he told Refresh Miami last November. “It also gave us validation for what we were doing.” These funds also enabled Shatsky and co-founders Andrew Duca and Jabari Browne to double down on building their platform. After that, TicketRev joined the Minnesota Twins Accelerator by Techstars.

To learn more about TicketRev, visit their website or search TicketRev in the App Store or Google Play.

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Riley Kaminer

I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.