Vivid Seats, a ticket exchange situated in Chicago, has acquired Vegas.com for $240 million. The payment was made partly by cash and partly by stock. This will help Vivid Seats raise its total addressable market (TAM) by over $6 billion. The company is known to be the third-biggest ticket exchange on the Web.
According to the CEO of Vivid Seats, Stan Chia, they are pleased to receive the opportunity to increase their TAM following the buyout of Vegas.com. It is now comprehensible, in his opinion, that live events are gaining in popularity over time.
Vivid Seats, which trades on the NYSE and Nasdaq under the symbol SEAT, will enter the Las Vegas arena event ticket market competition with Ticketmaster and StubHub following the acquisition of Vegas.com.
Vegas.com offers a comprehensive selection of tickets, including those for Las Vegas concerts, entertainment zones, and tours, in addition to tickets for hotel and flight reservations. This has been feasible since its establishment in 1998, owing to its exclusive partnerships with regional event organizers and administrators. The Las Vegas Sun newspaper and its proprietor, the Greenspun Corporation, were co-founders.
According to the casino news, The Chicago Tribune came out with an article in 2005 claiming that Vegas.com was on the list of the 50 most sought-after travel websites. In 2015, Remark Media, now called Remark Holdings, took over Vegas.com for $15.5 million in cash and $9.5 million in stocks.
In August, Vivid Seats took over Wavedash, which is a Japanese online ticket exchange, for $61 million in cash. Following that was the acquisition of Vegas.com.
The company Vivid Seats was formally established in 2001 under the leadership of Jerry Bednyak. Bednyak assumed leadership of the technical division, while Eric Vassilatos oversaw the organization’s finances. Two private equity firms were present at the time: Vista Equity Partners in 2016 and GTCR, which acquired a significant stake in Vivid Seats for $575 million in 2017 and subsequently made investments in the company.
Currently, Vivid Seats is known to have a market capitalization of $1.22 billion.
