Stanford University is among the investors in SeatGeek’s $35m series B round. The round into the online ticket retailer firm was led by Accel Capital, a Californian venture capital firm, and also included Causeway media, Melo7 Tech partners and Real Networks’s founder Rob Glaser – who, in turn, is a partner at Accel.
On top of the traditional investors, the company also managed to attract several athletes to the funding round, namely American football quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Eli Manning, as well as retired NBA basketball players Shane Battier and Mike Dunleavy Jr. It also included American rapper Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, better known as Nas.
Stanford’s investment came via its Stanford University Athletics, facilities which both paid-for and free offer sports entertainment, such as football games, accessible to the public.
SeatGeek, which describes itself as the “web’s largest ticket search engine”, has now raised a total of $41m in funding throughout seven seed rounds and a 2010 series A of $1.55m. As part of the series B investment, Accel’s John Locke is joining the company’s board of directors.
The company has built a meta-search engine which lets users look for tickets across several third-party reseller sites such as StubHub. Its estimate for August 2014 is $13m in resold tickets, with an expected total $160m in sales in 2014.
The funding will be used to improve the company’s mobile apps and marketing.
Jack Groetzinger, co-founder at SeatGeek, said: “We are not just trying to convert existing ticket buyers to SeatGeek. We are showing people events they did not know about, something they thought they could not afford but actually can.”
