SeatGeek nabs $35M from athletes and musicians whose tickets it helps sell

SeatGeek has served all kinds of fans in need of tickets for a long time, and now the people those fans pay money to see are turning their attention to the company.

Today, the event ticket search engine announced a new $35 million round of funding from musicians, athletes, and (of course) venture capitalists.

Launched all the way back in 2009 — an eternity in the world of big data startups — SeatGeek is a search engine for secondary markets. It aggregates tickets from dozens of other sites such as StubHub, UberSeat, and eBay, and analyzes them to find the best deals. The site also has a recommendation engine that makes suggestions based on people’s tastes.

While a big chunk of the funding the company has just raised comes from Accel Partners, a classic venture capital firm, the rest came from a selection of the folks for whose events SeatGeek helps sell tickets: football stars Peyton and Eli Manning, rapper Nas, Causeway Media Partners — which is led by Boston Celtics’ chief executive Wyc Grousbeck — and basketball star Carmelo Anthony’s investment fund Melo7 Tech Partners, among others.

“It is truly exciting to back the excellent SeatGeek team, together with our friends at Accel Partners,” said Grousbeck in a statement.

“The sports and entertainment marketplace is on the cusp of a massive transformation driven by improved technology that enhances the fan experience. In the realm of web and mobile ticketing, SeatGeek is already a leader, and I believe it is very well positioned to shape the industry going forward,” he said.

And that’s quite possible, as the company is not only on pace to do $160 million in ticket sales in 2014, but it also acquired its biggest rival, FanSnap, last December, although TiqIQ and others are still around. If these celebrities are looking to get a piece of the ticket pie, this investment is a pretty good way to do it.

SeatGeek plans to use its new money to grow its team, expand its product, and finally get serious about marketing and growth. Moreover, it will particularly focus those growth efforts on mobile, as the company is already seeing about 40 percent of its transactions happen on mobile devices, an encouraging statistic it would like to continue growing.

Along with the investors mentioned above, Stanford University Athletics, Seattle Mariners co-owner and Real Networks founder Rob Glaser, former NBA players Shane Battier and Mike Dunleavy Jr., and existing investors Mousse Partners and Thomas Lerhman also participated in the round.

Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see SeatGeek forge tighter partnerships with the organizations the collection of investors are affiliated with and hold events with paid tickets. After all, it’s partnered with Yahoo Sports, The Wall Street Journal, and others in the past.

SeatGeek was founded in 2009 by Russell D’Souza and Jack Groetzinger and is based in New York City. The company previously raised a total of $6 million in funding and participated in the DreamIt accelerator in 2009.