Hive, the Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario company that runs email, SMS and ad marketing for live events, announced a $27 million Series B led by growth equity firm Frontier Growth on October 21, 2026. More than 1,600 venues, promoters and festivals use it, and Hive says its customers have generated over $1 billion in ticket sales through the platform.
The money is less about a new idea than about an old fight. Every ticket sold creates a name, an email address and often a phone number, and the live business has spent a decade arguing over who gets to use them. Hive's pitch is that the people putting on the show should.
What does Hive actually do?
Hive pulls ticket buyer and event data from more than 40 ticketing platforms, including Ticketmaster, AXS, Eventim, Etix, Tixr and DICE, according to Music Business Worldwide. Event teams then sort those buyers by purchase history, location, artist and genre, and reach them by email, text or Meta ads, with reporting that ties each campaign to ticket revenue. On its own site, Hive lists concert promoters, music venues, festivals, fairs and rodeos, comedy clubs and timed-entry events as the businesses it serves, and adds presale registration pages, contests and web forms for growing a list.
The case studies it publishes are mid-sized rooms rather than stadiums: ASM Richmond, which Hive says made more than $500,000 from email in its first three months after leaving Mailchimp in early 2022, plus SCHEELS Arena in Fargo, Yoshi's in Oakland, EPIC Event Center in Wisconsin, the promoter DSP Shows and the Hulaween festival.
| Detail | What was reported |
|---|---|
| Round | $27 million USD Series B (nearly $38 million CAD), led by Frontier Growth of Charlotte, North Carolina |
| Structure | Mostly secondary, largely buying out Series A lead Avenue Growth Partners, per BetaKit |
| Raised to date | About $35 million USD, most of it secondary, per BetaKit |
| Board | Frontier founding partner Andrew Lindner joins |
| Team | 75 people; founded 2014 by CEO Ian Roberts and CTO Patrick Hannigan; Y Combinator Summer 2014 |
| Revenue | “Well past” $10 million USD in annual recurring revenue, Hannigan told BetaKit |
That structure matters. BetaKit reports that only a small slice of the $27 million is new money for product and sales, and that Hannigan called Hive “a sustainable, intentionally-built business” that has hovered around breakeven for years. Hive did not disclose its valuation.
Who owns the fan who bought the ticket?
Hive CEO Ian Roberts says live events have “always been a data problem disguised as a marketing problem,” as Music Business Worldwide quoted him on October 21. The line describes the industry's quiet arms race. When Ticketmaster named Hive a Ticketmaster Marketing Partner on June 2, its announcement said the tie-up helps event marketers “activate client-owned fan data.” In Ticketmaster's framing, the client is the venue or promoter. Hive's own roadmap promises AI assistants that keep organizers “in control of their voice and fan relationships.”
The money says the contest is getting expensive. Last month, Fever, which owns DICE, raised $250 million in a round led by EQT, which Fever called “the largest ever for a live-entertainment tech company,” per MBW. Streaming services want a seat too, from Spotify's Reserved tickets to subscriber presales that hand the first shot at seats to a paying list.
In a venue's CRM, the headliner is a filter. The buyer belongs to the room.
Where does the artist sit?
Hive's homepage says it is trusted by “venues, promoters, artists, and festivals,” but the tools are built for whoever runs the calendar. Among the filters Hive shows marketers is “artist,” next to genre, location and venue. That is fair to Hive: a venue booking hundreds of shows a year needs exactly that. It also means the fan who bought a ticket because of one singer often lands on the venue's list first, and on the artist's only if the artist built a list of their own.
Frontier's Lindner said the market is “underserved by generic tools” and that “Hive is positioned to lead that shift.” Lists also carry risk, as the Live Nation data breach suits showed. Whoever holds the buyer's contact details holds the next sale, and the obligation to protect it.