Sixth Street has invested $130 million in atVenu, which processes $1.6 billion in food, beverage and merchandise each year at live events. The private equity firm will have a “meaningful stake” in atVenu, according to Michael McGinn, a Sixth Street partner and cohead of the growth unit. The deal closed Friday, Oct. 4.
In 2012, Ben Brannen and Derek Ball co-founded atVenu, which provides payments and inventory logistics software that helps artists and companies manage and complete the sale of merchandise, food and beverages at live events such as concerts, festivals and sports games.
Ed Sheeran was one of the first artists to use the atVenu software. “He sells lots of T-shirts in the U.K.,” said Ball, who is atVenu’s CEO. Other AtVenu clients include the Final Four (NBA), Coachella and RedRocks.
Running live events isn’t easy. There are usually many different levels of operations involved including the tracking and selling of merchandise, said Brannen, who is atVenu’s president. There are also several different stakeholders who take part, including the artists or the sports teams, the fans attending the event, promoters as well as the company providing food and beverages.
Customers who use atVenu typically see their revenue increase by 20%, according to the company. “The transient structure of live events can often be very difficult for traditional investors to understand and really wrap their minds around,” Brannen said.
AtVenu’s software helps these parties sell merchandise in a frictionless way, he said. AtVenu, however, is not involved in the sale of tickets. “We are not an ecommerce company. We are about facilitating purchases at live events,” said Brannen.
AtVenu has raised about $38 million in funding, according to PitchBook. Frontier Growth invested $30 million in atVenu in 2022. Frontier and the company’s other investors, which include FJ Labs and Tekton Ventures, did not immediately reply to requests from comment. Some early investors will exit with the sale, said Sixth Street’s McGinn.
AtVenu was profitable prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and then fell “into the red” when the virus caused live events to shut down in 2020, said CEO Ball. He added that, when the world began to open back up, there was considerable pent-up demand for live entertainment, leading the company to become profitable again.
Sixth Street first heard about atVenu when an associate bought a T-shirt at a concert in late 2023. The associate discovered that it was atVenu that was providing the software that facilitated payments for the event. He got in contact with atVenu co-founders Brannen and Ball, who then ended up attending Sixth Street’s CEO conference in April. Sixth Street approached atVenu about investing, which prompted the company’s board to explore its options. They hired Garrett DeNinno of Raymond James to advise on a process over the summer that attracted private equity firms, Ball said. Sixth Street emerged as the victor. “Sixth Street stood up very early as being the most likely candidate and as it ended, they were the right candidate for us, the right partner,” said Ball.
AtVenu plans to use proceeds to fund its expansion internationally and push further into sports. Two years ago, atVenu began doing live events in the U.K. and this past summer opened up in Spain and Germany, Brannen said. Both co-founders plan to stay with the company. AtVenu currently employs about 80 people and plans to use proceeds to hire, having just added its first employees in the U.K.
“We are going to drive this thing as hard as possible along with [Sixth Street]. We’re really the only ones out there thinking about live events the way that we do, and we understand all of those nuances that really make them challenging,” said Ball.
The investment comes just weeks since Sixth Street became one of several PE firms to be provisionally preapproved to invest in NFL teams. Sixth Street owns stakes in the NWSL’s Bay FC and the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs. (Sixth Street also owns a piece of FC Barcelona’s TV rights and the stadium of Real Madrid in Spain’s top soccer league.) Sixth Street’s investment came from its most recent growth fund that raised $4.4 billion in 2022.
“We want to help them build on the success that they’ve had in sports, and if there’s ways that we can help accelerate that growth, that’s what we’re focused on,” McGinn said.
