Coras, an Irish ticketing startup that uses API integration, has secured a €200,000 (£176,000/$228/000) investment from Enterprise Ireland only months after its launch.
Coras uses the idea that tickets can be pooled online through API integration, the same way that other perishable inventory such as flights, hotels and car rentals are so often seen today.
“Event tickets are not usually available to multiple providers and we’re trying to build a global distribution system for ticketing,” said Mark McLaughlin, Coras co-founder, according to the Biz Plus website.
“If the ticket inventory is available in real time to multiple sellers using a product like Coras, it means customers don’t just have to go to one site like Ticketmaster to buy tickets, where they’re competing with bots.”
The startup was established in 2015 as Corasdotio, gaining investments totalling €1.5m, with its most notable backer being U2 guitarist The Edge.
“The idea of having tickets sent to your mobile phone was novel at the time,” McLaughlin said.
“But we underestimated the capital requirements to build a consumer brand. As we were building Ticket Text, we noticed that the quality of ticketing software in the marketplace was poor. We had a network of clients but the wrong product.
“We figured that out about nine months after launching Ticket Text. We had to realign completely from being a consumer brand to being a technology company, a white label software company to power the venues and promoters we worked with.”
McLaughlin previously founded ticketing and venue management solution company Ticket ABC in 2016. While €4.2m was raised for the venture, it tapped almost €5.1m in losses in 2015. It will continue to operate separately, he told Biz Plus.
McLaughlin and co-founder James Bailey revamped Ticket Text as Ticket ABC, re-launching in 2009.
“With Ticket Text we raised a chunky amount of money; in 2006 it was the peak of craziness in Ireland,” McLaughlin said. “For Ticket ABC we had to bootstrap initially. People worked for free or for equity until we secured a small amount of investment to kick it off.”
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