TC50 Finalist SeatGeek Closes $1 Million Series A Round, Partners With Nielsen

ExclusiveSeatGeek, one of the finalists of TechCrunch50 2009, has raised $1 million in Series A funding led by Founder Collective and joined by NYC Seed.

The funding brings SeatGeek’s total investment to over $1.5 million, and it intends to use the new capital to hire more engineers and business developers.

Founder Collective and NYC Seed thusly join SeatGeek’s current investor line-up, which includes Stage One Capital, Trisiras Group, PKS Capital and angel investors Arie Abecassis, Sunil Hirani, Thomas Lehrman, Allen Levinson and Mark Wachen.

SeatGeek is a bit of an odd duck in the secondary ticket market. The startup essentially forecasts the price of sports and concert tickets on the secondary market, analogous to what Farecast (now Bing Travel) does for airline tickets.

This helps ticket buyers determine whether to buy a ticket immediately or wait for a price drop, while at the same time helping sellers identify the optimal time to unload tickets.

SeatGeek says its crawlers have helped compile a database of millions of ticket transactions as well as a bunch of other factors that influence prices, data it uses to algorithmically predict ticket prices as accurately as possible.

SeatGeek will henceforth focus on making its data and analytics more accessible to strategic partners, consumers, and the media. Recently, the company partnered with Nielsen Entertainment to bring its ticketing data and analytics to the record industry.

In addition, the New York-based company announced the launch of MLB Fan Sentiment pages, which show historical ticketing trends for each team and ranks each team on fan popularity.

For example, on the New York Yankees Fan Sentiment page, fans can see how recent events like George Steinbrenner’s death and Alex Rodriguez’ 600th home run chase affected fan interest in the team.

SeatGeek says it will roll out Fan Sentiment pages for all major sports teams and artists in the upcoming weeks.