- Lyte, a company defining a new category in live events, announced it raised $15 million in funding and signed a partnership with Etix
Lyte — a company that is defining a new category in live events (post-primary ticketing) for partners like Coachella, BottleRock Napa Valley, Newport Folk Festival, Mumford & Sons and hundreds more — announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding to drive development of the platform, scale operations, and continue to revolutionize the live entertainment experience for all stakeholders.
Antony (Ant) Taylor, CEO of Lyte, founded the company on the firm belief that fans and rights-holders could take back control of the secondary market if given the right technology tools. And by working with partners in the live event industry, Lyte delivers on a simple yet previously out-of-reach consumer proposition: real tickets at fair prices.
“We made a foundational bet we could build a platform and marketplace that included and benefited all of the folks with financial and emotional investment in this industry – rights holders, talent, enterprise ticketing companies as well as fans,” said Taylor in a statement. “This raise is a validation of that bet. It’s a win for our partners and the future of the live events ecosystem.”
Jackson Square Ventures was joined by Industry Ventures, Accomplice Ventures, and Correlation Ventures for this round. Plus a group of prominent entertainment and technology industry insiders also joined like Bernie Cahill and Activist Artist Management (Greg Suess), former Pandora chief technology officer Chris Martin, Matt Mickiewicz (Co-Founder of 99 Designs, Hired and Flippa) and Robert Goldberg (CEO of Fresno Inc and Lyte Board Member).
“Lyte has an amazing opportunity to radically improve the customer experience in a sector that has seen fundamentally little innovation over the last decade,” added Mickiewicz. “Their marketplace is both reducing risk and redefining the fan experience in a way that actually grows the overall market.”
With this round of funding, Lyte plans to accelerate its mission to build up its post-primary ticketing platform, manifested as private label ticketing services.
“When Bernie Cahill and I first met Ant in 2016, we thought he had the right instincts about what the industry needs,” explained Greg Suess, founding partner at Activist Artist Management. “Three years later we were blown away at Lyte’s results. They are relentless executors. Our portfolio has also grown to include sports and entertainment as well. Lyte fills a need across all live events. That’s why we’re backing them.”
There are more than a dozen of the world’s top primary ticketing companies that have integrated Lyte into their platforms, including AEG’s Elevate, Live Nation’s Front Gate, and Eventbrite along with its Ticketfly subsidiary. And as a platform, Lyte claims 60% of the $13 billion secondary market for the events it powers.
“Lyte is the first marketplace of its kind to utilize digital ticketing to fundamentally improve the fan experience,” commented Josh Breinlinger, Jackson Square Ventures partner and Lyte Board Member. “We’re excited about this investment because it has excellent marketplace characteristics: highly fragmented supply and demand, high repeat usage with different stakeholders, proprietary supply of tickets, improved experience through technology, and it’s all embedded in the payment flow.”
Lyte saw major growth this year as it matched its 2018 revenue by Q1 and the growing reservations booked on the platform hit $78 million year-to-date, up 5-fold from a year ago.
“When our clients choose Lyte, they are choosing a platform that addresses the customer needs ignored by the traditional secondary market, and it does so in a way that is fair to fans, controlled by rights holders and which harnesses the best in yield management and marketplace science,” stated Lawrence Peryer, Lyte’s Head of Business and Corporate Development. “Lyte puts control, revenue, and insights into the hands of event-producers, while providing a simple, safe, and affordable fan experience. Combined with this funding round, the consortium of entities involved, our name-brand clients and legions of happy fans – Lyte’s platform is changing the face of ticketing while closing the door on the incumbent secondary players.”
Lyte also announced earlier this week that it partnered with Etix, the largest independent ticketing company in North America. The two companies are going to work together to help more people safely and easily attend live events like concerts, festivals, sports, conferences, and performing arts. Launched in 2000, Etix process 50 million tickets per year for more than 2,000 international clients.
“We partnered with Lyte to offer our clients a secure, fan-first, solution to the secondary market,” noted Etix founder Travis Janovich. “Lyte will help curtail fraud, reduce no-show rates, drive incremental revenue, and deliver real, cost-effective savings to fans.”
