Eventbrite, the online ticketing service founded by husband-and-wife team Kevin and Julia Hartz, has filed to go public.
The San Francisco startup said Thursday in a regulatory filing that it plans to raise $200 million through its IPO, although that figure is likely a placeholder and could change. The company said in a separate statement that the “number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined.”
Eventbrite plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “EB.”
The company’s business model involves helping organization s sell tickets to events through its online platform, and it a takes a cut of each ticket sold for a particular event. Last year, Eventbrite said it enabled more than 700,000 organizations to “issue approximately 203 million tickets across approximately three million events in over 170 countries,” according to its corporate filing.
Like many tech startups that have gone public in recent years, Eventbrite is unprofitable, but its revenue continues to grow. Eventbrite logged $201.6 million in sales for its fiscal 2017, which was a 51% bump from the $133.5 million it made in 2016. It lost $38.5 million in 2017, a 4.7% decrease from 2016 when its net loss was $40.4 million.
Some of the company’s competitors include Live Nation Entertainment subsidiaries Front Gate Tickets, TicketWeb, and Universe, the filings said.
Organizations using Eventbrite’s service often publicize their events though third-party distributors like Facebook and Spotify. Eventbrite’s platform can interlink with those third-party services so that it can still take a cut of sales per each ticket even if people purchase a ticket from those individual sites.
However, the company said in its filing that “these third-party partners may terminate their relationship with us, limit certain integration functionality, change their treatment of our services or restrict access to their platform by creators at any time.”
Eventbrite’s filing notes a previous experience with Facebook (FB) in which the social networking giant “removed a feature of its service that allowed creators to include multiple hosts on a single event seamlessly across platforms, which negatively impacted certain music creators’ use of the Facebook integration with our platform.”
Any sudden move by Facebook, Spotify, or other third-party platforms that alters the public-facing experience of purchasing a ticket via Eventbrite could potentially harm its business, the company said.
Additionally, Eventbrite warns that their business and financial health could be impacted if tech giants like Google (GOOG) or Facebook debut their own ticketing services or refer “leads to suppliers, other favored partners or themselves directly.”
In 2013, Coins2Day named Julia Hartz as one of the most powerful women entrepreneurs in business. In 2016, she formally took over as Eventbrite’s CEO after her husband went on medical leave. “This is a new reality,” she told Coins2Day at the time.
