Yazhini Shanumgam and Santhos Premraj founded Ticket 9, a B2B event technology firm that aids in streamlining event management, enhancing attendee engagement, and boosting income.
Organising an event requires an enormous amount of work, from invitations to registration to partnering. A business-to-business firm called Ticket 9 in Coimbatore uses technology to streamline the workflow by automating repetitive tasks involved in event planning. “Ticket 9 is built on the idea that anyone anywhere in the world desiring to create an event, sell tickets, or engage attendees in events should have a powerful tool to do it easily,” Santhos Premraj, Co-founder and Product Architect, said.
Yazhini Shanumgam and Premraj founded the events technology firm Ticket 9 in 2022. Ticket 9 develops SaaS technologies to assist users in creating, managing, promoting, and making money from events of various sizes. Ticket 9 assists organisers with tracking ticket sales and scheduling email notifications, among other services. registering an event and publishing it on Ticket 9 “is as simple as creating an email id,” the co-founder claims. The co-founder and CEO of Ticket 9 Shanumgam explains, “Our platform is designed to be user-friendly, especially for first-time event organisers, while also offering flexibility for larger events.” According to co-founder Premraj, one of the difficulties event planners encounter is efficiently handling the check-in process, especially when dealing with a high number of guests. A strong QR-based check-in validation system was created by the company to solve this problem.
“We streamlined and simplified the registration procedure for event organisers by using the QR-based check-in system. The admission points just need attendees to show their QR codes, whether they are printed or stored on their mobile devices. In order to ensure a rapid and accurate check-in process for both organisers and participants, our technology swiftly and reliably validates the validity of the QR codes. Each ticket sold through the B2B platform is subject to a minimum 5% transaction fee. The company’s initial investment from the founders was Rs 18 lakh, or around $22,000, and it generated revenue of $23,000 in FY23. Paytm Insider and Bookmyshow are more companies in the B2B events management market. Working behind the scenes on significant events like marathons and live concerts, Premraj began his career as an event coordinator. He was motivated to create industry solutions because these events lacked technological assistance. He discussed the concept with his friend Shanmugam, a team leader for a software business and event enthusiast. In October 2019, the founders of Ticket 9 first had the idea for the company. Using the meagre funds left over from their previous business, they started developing an events tech solution.
They registered their domain, and in February 2020, the beta version of their events solution was made available. Supporting physical events was the main goal of the beta version. However, the COVID-19 epidemic compelled them to change their corporate direction. “It first started as a product from our first firm, and it took us eight months to develop and produce the beta version. However, as we worked on the concept, we saw how important it was to respond to market developments following COVID, which prompted us to enhance Ticket 9’s capabilities to accommodate both physical events and virtual and hybrid ones,” says Premraj. On their initial business, the founders opted not to comment. Using the resources of their prior business, they planned more than 60 virtual events for the epidemic. The gatherings included corporate webinars, virtual meetups, and virtual sports, and they drew over 500 people. They registered as a distinct company under the name Ticket 9 Event Tech Private Limited two years later, in 2022. According to Premraj, “We modified our platform to support virtual and hybrid events, aligning with the evolving needs of event organisers in the new normal.”
The startup has so far sponsored over 270 events in both physical and virtual space. These include Creaticon – The Social Company, Coimbatore Badminton Champion, and Rovers – International Sports Carnival. market potential The global events industry market size was estimated at $887 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $2,194.40 billion by 2028, rising at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 13.48% from 2021 to 2028, according to Verified Market Research. “Up to this point, we have a market share of about 0.7%.
According to Shanumgam, we provide services to the events industry based on the type of event (concert, festival, sporting event, exhibition, conference, corporate event, and others). M2P Co-founder Prabhu Rangarajan, bitsCrunch’s CEO Vijay Pravin Maharajan, CTO Ashok Vardharajan, and other angel investors from the US, Singapore, Australia, and Bangkok contributed $120,000 to the startup’s pre-seed round in May 2023. Users from Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bengaluru are currently using the platform. 12 people make up the staff at Ticket 9. Ticket 9 plans to grow its business abroad in the future. “We are in discussions for strategic relationships with a few event planners in the UAE areas. For our global operations, we are developing a new stage. Within this year, the initial expansion will begin in Singapore and the UAE, according to Shanumgam.
