London ticket firm gets Mass. funding
Two Boston-area venture capital firms are joining a consortium to fund Europe's answer to StubHub, the online marketplace for buying and selling tickets for sports and other events.
Fidelity Ventures, of Boston, and Waltham-based Atlas Venture, working with two European firms, are set to disclose today a $25 million investment in Seatwave, a British company started last year to buy and sell tickets on the so-called secondary market.
Simon Clark, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, the venture capital arm of Fidelity Investments, said the move is part of a larger strategy by his firm to bankroll companies that use the Internet to "disintermediate" middlemen, such as brokers or credit card providers.
Fidelity Ventures previously has invested in companies like Alibaba, which connects manufacturers with suppliers in China.
"We have been investing in marketplaces of one kind or another for quite some time," Clark said. "We take a lot of our knowledge about financial markets and apply it to other things."
Seatwave, based in London, was started by Joe Cohen, a former executive at Ticketmaster and Match.com. Fidelity and Atlas joined with existing investors Mangrove Capital Partners, of Luxembourg, and Adinvest, of Zurich, in the venture round.
While online ticket brokers in the United States focus on sporting events, the European market is potentially broader, with heavy interest in music, theater, and other arts events, Clark said. Moreover, he suggested, European regulators are, "generally speaking, more relaxed about the secondary ticket market than the US is."
One exception, however, is soccer in the United Kingdom (where it is known as football). Fearing the return of hooligans banned from stadiums because of violence in the 1990s, the British government has outlawed the reselling of soccer tickets, Clark said.
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 