London’s Dice Raises $122M at a $400M Valuation For its Intelligent Event Discovery and Booking Platform

Originally published by TechCrunch

COVID-19 really put the kibosh on live events in the last 18 months, but in the world of tech, it also meant that live event startups that found a way to survive and grow throughout the period got a lot of attention. In the latest development, Dice — a London company that has built a platform to help people discover and attend live events that might be of interest to them — has raised $122 million, a funding round that sources tell us values the company at $400 million.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is leading the round, a Series C, with iPod “father” and Nest co-founder Tony Fadell (by way of Future Shape), Blisce, French entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Mirabaud, Cassius and Evolution — all previous backers — also participating. (Previous investors in the company also include DeepMind co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis, notable given the company’s early focus on data science and recommendation algorithms.) Prior to this round Dice had raised around $45 million, according to PitchBook estimates.

Dice focuses these days mostly on live music, and in the peak of the pandemic, as everyone was locked down, it rejigged its business model to focus on livestreaming: now with some 6,400 livestreamed events and thousands more in-person events under its belt, to appeal to a wider audience with a wider range of needs, it is expanding around a multimodal strategy, providing options to discover and attend/buy tickets to both streamed and in-person live events.

The new funds will be going toward expanding Dice’s geographic footprint with a special focus on the U.S. since this is where Dice’s business seems to be growing the fastest at the moment, as cities and consumers gradually come out of pandemic hibernation to spend time together again, in some cases at a frenetic pace. Phil Hutcheon, Dice’s CEO and co-founder, said that in New York alone, over 1 million people used Dice to find and attend events in the single month of August.

(Sidenote on investors and founders: Hutcheon co-founded Dice in 2014 with Ustwo, the agency that also spawned Monument Valley, helped incubate Tray.io and has worked on number of other creative projects alongside its digital agency business: I’ve confirmed that Ustwo, which hadn’t had an operational role in Dice in years, has also sold its shares in the startup in this round.)

Giants like Ticketmaster, Live Nation, StubHub and Eventbrite dominate the landscape for ticketing for events, but Hutcheon contends that these and other legacy platforms are too static and not fit for the modern age, and specifically modern demands.

They are expensive both for event organizers and attendees to use, and they have been slow to address both some of the more damaging parts of the event industry, such as ticket touting and counterfeiting; and some of the more promising aspects of it, such as providing better insights to event organizers based on all the data that can been gleaned from the average event browser and consumer.