Hive raises $27M Series B from Frontier Growth to grow its marketing platform for venues and promoters
Hive, a marketing platform built for venues, promoters and festivals, has raised a $27 million Series B led by growth equity firm Frontier Growth. The company says more than 1,600 live event businesses use it, with integrations into more than 40 ticketing providers, and plans to spend the money on product, more integrations, AI assistants and international expansion.
Hive, the marketing platform that sits behind the emails, texts and audience lists of a large number of live event businesses, has raised a $27 million Series B. The round is led by Frontier Growth, a growth equity firm based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was announced on 21 October.
Hive was founded in 2014 by Ian Roberts and Patrick Hannigan and is based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. It is a Y Combinator alumnus. The company says more than 1,600 venues, promoters and festivals use the platform, which connects to more than 40 ticketing providers, including Ticketmaster, AXS, Eventim, Etix, Tixr and DICE. Reports differ on the ticket sales figure linked to Hive campaigns: Music Business Worldwide and Pollstar cite more than $1 billion, while Dealroom cites more than $700 million.
According to BetaKit, the round is majority secondary, meaning a large part of the money goes to existing shareholders rather than into the company. BetaKit puts Hive's total funding to date at about $35 million, and reports that the company did not share its valuation. Hive says the new capital will go into product development, more ticketing and data integrations, AI powered assistants and international expansion.
The deal says something about where value is moving in live music. Ticketing platforms decide who gets the transaction, but marketing tools decide who owns the relationship afterwards. A promoter who can segment buyers by genre, past attendance and spend, and then reach them directly by email or SMS, depends less on paid social and on any single ticketing company.
For artists and managers, the same logic applies at a smaller scale. When you play a promoter's night, the ticket buyers usually end up in the promoter's database, not yours. It is worth asking promoters how they market to past attendees, whether they can run a targeted campaign to fans of your sound before your date, and how you can capture your own fans at the show. If Hive and tools like it keep growing, the promoters using them will know their audiences in more detail, and artists who bring their own data to the conversation will get better campaigns in return.