Festival travel booking site Festicket raises $6.3M Series B

Festicket, the UK startup that lets you book a wide range of music festival experiences, has closed $6.3 million in Series B funding. Lepe Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Wellington Partners, PROfounders, and Playfair Capital.

Noteworthy, the London-based company has also picked up Arthur Kosten (ex-CMO of Booking.com) and Jean-Charles Carré (the business partner and manager of DJ David Guetta) as backers.

“The new capital will be deployed into operational and marketing resources to grow the Festicket live music fan community, supplier base and brand globally,” Zack Sabban, co-founder and CEO of Festicket, tells me. “We clearly intend to make Festicket the most powerful brand in the music festival industry and all resources will go toward this goal”.

To that end, Sabban says that the startup’s strongest market is its home country of the UK, but that the plan is to take the model, which he feels is now validated, and grow internationally. France, Germany, and the Netherlands will be the focus next, including the recruitment of “native-speaking teams and local offices,” he says.

Festicket lets you discover and book festival tickets and, crucially, the related travel itinerary in an attempt to make attending festivals as easy as booking a package holiday. It covers 500-plus music festivals across 40 countries via a network of 1,000 suppliers for accommodation and travel packages. That scale is something that Sabban claims has never been realised by any single player operating in what he says is a hugely growing market.

“Over the last two years, we grew our revenue by 425 per cent on average year-on-year and went from a nice little player in the music festival industry to be clearly — and by a long run — Europe’s largest online platform for music festival experiences,” adds Sabban.

And while the startup isn’t disclosing actual revenue, it claims a community of 900,000-plus festival-goers, and is currently seeing 2 million unique monthly visitors.