The ticketing startup began with a humane idea: let fans return what they could not use. Eleven years, at least $53 million and one risky expansion later, its sudden collapse exposed how much trust had been riding on the plumbing.
The Hong Kong publisher has built shopping, ticketing and rewards around the daily news habit. Its most revealing growth experiment began with runners looking for photographs of themselves.
The New York startup won organizers with faster payouts, built-in promotion and pages that keep the host in the spotlight. After processing $350 million in ticket sales, its next trick is harder: making the group chat choose a plan.
TickPick built a ticket marketplace around one small act of retail honesty: the number you see is the number you pay. Now it is using that promise to move from resale app to a broader live-events platform.
It books the band, owns the room, prints the ticket and sells the beer sponsorship. Inside the $23-billion machine that moves 150 million concertgoers a year - and the antitrust fight over whether one company should do all of that.
Oveit is an Austin-based event technology company that runs ticketing, registration, cashless payments and access control on a single platform. Founded in 2016 by Andrei Stefan and Mike Mihai Dragan, it turns RFID/NFC wristbands and mobile passes into the wallet visitors wear at waterparks, theme parks, festivals, resorts and conferences - handling sales, entry and on-site spending in one closed loop. The company has extended into live shopping (Streams.live), NFT ticketing and AI sales agents, positioning itself as an all-in-one operating system for live experiences.
OTTO SPORT AI is a Minneapolis-based startup building an AI-powered operating system for youth sports. Founded by veterans of SportsEngine, TeamSnap, NCSA, and FloSports and led by CEO Luke Zaientz, it consolidates fragmented tools for club management, league and tournament operations, ticketing, and athlete recruitment into one platform. Its flagship AI product, OTTO PILOT, answers parent and athlete questions from an organization's own knowledge base to cut administrative workload. The company launched publicly in January 2026 with $16.5M in seed funding and three strategic acquisitions.
Softjourn is a full-cycle software development and IT consulting company founded in 2001, headquartered in Fremont, California (Silicon Valley) with research and development offices in Ukraine, Poland, and Brazil. With 200-300 engineers and consultants, it builds custom software for three core verticals - Fintech and Cards & Payments, Event Ticketing, and Media & Entertainment - offering services from product design and development to QA, DevOps, AI/ML, blockchain, and dedicated development teams. Clients include Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Vendini, SecuTix, eTix, and PEX, and the firm has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list multiple years running.