Eventbrite buys London-based social conference directory Lanyrd

American self-service ticketing platform has closed its two first acquisitions, including London start-up Lanyrd.


American self-service ticketing platform has closed its two first acquisitions, including London start-up Lanyrd.

Eventbrite has followed up on the $60 million (£38 million) funding it received back in April by making its first acquisitions.

Alongside Argentinean-based ticketing company Eventioz, Eventbrite has also bought London start-up Lanyrd for an undisclosed amount.

According to Eventbrite, the two new purchases will bring ‘powerful product and technical assets’ as well as industry expertise in Latin America.

Founded in 2010, Lanyrd’s offering allows speaker and attendees at conferences to access event information, slides and video of presentations. The business will now be moving its operations to Eventbrite’s San Francisco base.

Natalie Downe, co-founder of Lanyrd, comments, ‘The Eventbrite team shares the same passion for live events that drove us to create Lanyrd in the first place.

‘We are thrilled to join a company with such strong engineering talent and believe we can contribute significantly to its product.’

More on acquisitions of London-based start-ups:

Since setting up in 2006, Eventbrite has netted $140 million of venture capital investments. Its latest round, worth $60 million, was led by Tiger Global Management and T. Rowe Price – joining the likes of Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures.

Pat Poels, vice president of engineering at Eventbrite, adds, ‘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 organiser analytics.’

Going forward, Eventbrite says that its acquisition drive will allow it to push forward with international expansion, mobile development and event discovery. The business recently revealed that it had processed 130 million tickets worth $1.5 billion in 179 countries.

Hunter Ruthven

Bernard Williamson

Hunter was the Editor for GrowthBusiness.co.uk from 2012 to 2014, before moving on to Caspian Media Ltd to be Editor of Real Business.

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Venture capital funding