Japanese ticketing and data platform Zaiko has raised $1m (£752,000/€845,000) in a Series A funding round to develop new technologies and further grow its business.
Zaiko has held over 1,700 live streaming events in the five months since it developed its paid live streaming platform following the shutdown of live events due to COVID-19.
As of July 2020, the self-service, white-label ticketing service has sold approximately 500,000 live streaming tickets.
Sasa Vucinic, co-founder of media investment firm North Base Media, which led the funding round along with Monex Ventures, applauded Zaiko’s response to COVID-19.
Vucinic said: “We think that Zaiko’s innovative product created a new, niche market in the domain of events, as it allows artists and content creators of every kind to perform directly to their cyber audiences, giving them full control over all aspects of performance and monetisation.
“Zaiko, in fact, created a new type of events – events that are in between the live performance and the recorded one. We are very excited to help the company make this innovation global, and bring it to the other markets.”
Zaiko supports multilingual ticket purchasing in English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese, and users can also purchase in their local currencies.
Malek Nasser, Zaiko chief executive and founder, said: “We are very excited to be closing our Series A round with great partners like North Base Media and Monex. We feel that having these partners moving forward will allow us to reach beyond our current business in order to scale to the next level.”
The firm is now aiming to close a Series B round in early 2021.
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