A two-sided marketplace where fans across the UK, Germany, Spain and France buy and resell tickets to the shows they refuse to miss - and one created not in a garage, but by a regulator's order.
Somewhere in London, Berlin, or Madrid, a phone lights up. A seller in another city has just listed two tickets to a show that sold out months ago. Within seconds the listing is priced, protected, and in front of a fan who'd given up hope. No box office. No queue. No paper. Just a marketplace doing the unglamorous work of matching the person who has a ticket with the person who wants one.
That marketplace is StubHub International - the part of the StubHub brand that operates everywhere outside North America. Most people who use it never think about the corporate plumbing behind the transaction. They just want the seat. But the company underneath is one of the more curious creatures in e-commerce: a household name that became a standalone business because a competition regulator said it had to.
To understand it, you have to untangle a family tree that doubles back on itself - twice through the same founder, once through a Spanish startup, and finally through a ruling handed down in London.
StubHub opened in 2000 and made the secondary ticket market something you could trust enough to use on a laptop. One of its co-founders, Eric Baker, left before eBay bought the company in 2007. He then founded viagogo in 2006 to take the same idea to Europe. For years the two businesses he started competed across an ocean from each other.
In February 2020, the story folded back on itself: viagogo bought StubHub from eBay for $4.05 billion, reuniting both of Baker's companies under one roof. The catch came from London. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority spent 18 months scrutinising the deal and decided one owner shouldn't hold both brands. Its remedy was blunt - sell the international half.
In 2021, the non-North American operations were divested to Digital Fuel Capital, a Boston-based investment firm. The teams in London, Madrid, Bilbao and Berlin became a new, independent company: StubHub International. The North American StubHub stayed with viagogo. Two businesses, one name, an ocean apart - again.
There's a Spanish thread running through all of this. Much of the international operation traces back to Ticketbis, a resale marketplace founded in Bilbao that eBay bought for roughly $165 million in 2016 to push StubHub into dozens of new markets. That acquisition is why Bilbao and Madrid sit at the centre of the company today rather than San Francisco.
Strip away the corporate history and the product is refreshingly simple. It does two things, and tries to do them without the usual anxiety attached to resold tickets.
Search real-time availability across the UK, Germany, Spain, France and dozens of other markets for concerts, sport, theatre and festivals - then take delivery as a mobile or transferred ticket.
List tickets you no longer need with pricing and delivery tools, reaching demand far beyond your own city - whether you're a one-off seller or a professional.
The FanProtect guarantee is the company's answer to the oldest fear in resale: valid tickets, delivered on time, or a replacement or refund.
A two-sided marketplace earning service and seller fees per resold ticket. Revenue rises with the volume and price of the live events flowing through it.
Live-event fans buying and reselling across non-North American markets, plus individual and professional sellers - served by a team of roughly 90 people.
In January 2024, Bob Kupbens took over as CEO - first on an interim basis, then for keeps. His resume reads like a tour of consumer commerce: VP of seller and marketplace operations at eBay, chief innovation and product officer at ADT, chief product and technology officer at Neiman Marcus Group.
The eBay detail is the telling one. Kupbens was there from 2016 to 2019 - while eBay still owned StubHub. Running StubHub International now is less a new chapter than a return to a story he'd already been part of.
Return to that phone lighting up at 11pm. The fan taps buy. The seller, a city away, gets a notification that the ticket they couldn't use just found a home. Neither of them thinks about a Boston investment firm, a London regulator, a Bilbao startup, or a founder who built two rival companies. They don't need to.
That's the quiet trick of StubHub International. The corporate story is a knot - acquisitions, divestitures, two companies wearing the same five letters. The product is the opposite: a seat changes hands, protected, and a show that was sold out is suddenly not, for one more person. The plumbing is complicated so the moment doesn't have to be.