A venue promoter with a sold-out room still has a marketing problem: the people who came last time are scattered across ticketing systems, email lists and phone contacts, and nobody connects them.
Hive has spent a decade solving that for live events, and Frontier Growth just bought into the result. The Kitchener-Waterloo company will announce $27M in Series B equity, most of it secondary capital used to almost entirely buy out Avenue Growth Partners, the Washington firm that led its $7M Series A in 2023.
Only a small slice is primary money for product and go-to-market. Co-founder and chief technology officer Patrick Hannigan describes the business as deliberately sustainable rather than a swing for a hundredfold outcome.
Mailchimp for people who sell tickets
Hive connects fan purchase data to email, text, advertising and CRM tools so promoters can automate campaigns with AI. It serves more than 1,600 venues, promoters and festivals, from arenas to small bars, and its clients have sold over $1B in tickets through the platform. Hannigan says annual recurring revenue is well past $10M.
The company started in 2014 in a University of Waterloo computer lab as a ticketing business, went through Y Combinator and the school’s Velocity incubator, and pivoted repeatedly before finding fit around 2019. It lost 60% of revenue almost overnight when the pandemic hit, then rebuilt.
Why a growth fund, not a venture fund
Frontier partner Andrew Lindner, joining the board, points to a product embedded in customers’ revenue and compounded by proprietary data and network effects, in a live events market still served by generic tools.
For Canadian software, the deal is a familiar shape: modest capital, real profitability, and a buyer who wants cash flow rather than a moonshot.
