German ticket-selling wonderboys (Amiando) get financing

Written on 5th June 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

If you have visited a tech conference lately, chances are high you’re familiar with the tickets from Amiando. This German service – based in Munich – helps event organizers to sell tickets online and is quite popular. Le Web 3 has used their services, as well as DLD, The Crunchies, LIFT08, and next08. Take their solid business model – ask a few percent commission (between 2.5 and 5) – in account, and you’re probably not surprised to hear Amiando is quite a successful start-up. Today, they’ll announce their first round of financing – reports VentureBeat.

Wellington Partners and Adinvest both have invested in Amiando, which is heading for an Asian adventure. After offering Spanish support in March and French in September, the German ticket-selling wonderboys now have a partnership with Web2Asia, a company that helps Western tech start-ups to grow in the mysterious markets of East Asia. With an increasing amount of Chinese events, this market has a lot of potential for Amiando.

Web2Asia co-founder Markus Fuhrmann told me that the sooner a company heads to China, the higher the chances for success: ““A lot of the successes are from companies who came to China very early in their product life cycle, giving them time to adjust before Chinese competition could copy their business model, or create a more culturally matched version.” Well, I’d put my money in Amiando, as they’re only six sixteen months old.

Update: A PR representative from Amiando has just told me that their Asian ambitions are limited to the distribution partnership with Web2Asia. They’re still focusing on the European market.