SeatGeek raises funds to give you the best deals on event tickets

We’re just coming out of a season of tech predictions — leaving a trail of top 10 products, trends, etc. to watch. And more will probably be wrong than right. But New York City startup SeatGeek has figured out a way to consistently make accurate predictions, and has just closed a first round of funding to prove it.  What’s it predicting? Ticket prices.

This isn’t the first we’ve seen of SeatGeek, the company presented at TechCrunch50 in September last year and was selected as a finalist. VentureBeat also spotlighted it, along with several others, for having ambitious goals, wanna-have-it products, and a realistic business plan.

Buying event tickets can be nerve-racking. Are you getting the best price? Is someone ripping you off? SeatGeek aims to relieve this pressure by using a complex algorithm to determine whether tickets on the secondary market, sold through resellers like StubHub and Razorgator, are increasing (buy now) or decreasing (you should wait for a lower price). The company boasts that its forecasts are 82 percent accurate.

The company has also launched a new web site with several enhanced features, including an email alert system that updates you when a buying opportunity is at its best, or when specific prices become available. Through a partnership with SeatQuest, the company can now provide interactive seating charts. Now users can know instantly where they will be sitting when they buy passes.

According to TechCrunch, the company has secured between $500,000 and $1 million in its recent round of financing, which will be added to a previous seed funding of $20,000 from DreamIt Ventures.

The new round was led by four angel investors, including Sunil Hirani (founder of Creditex, an online derivatives market that was acquired for $625 million in 2008), Mark Wachen (founder of Optimost, an enterprise multivariate testing app acquired for $52 million three years ago), Arie Abecassis (former president of MindFire) and Allen Levinson (former managing director of Moody’s KMV). Funding will be mainly used for hiring, SeatGeek says.