With Pre Series A, online ticketing platform Explara enters movie ticketing space

Bengaluru-based DIY event ticketing platform Explara has raised $500K in its Pre-Series A funding round led by Hyderabad Angels, Ness Wadia, and Singapore Angel Network. Existing investors Blume Ventures, Krishna Lakamsani, and Rajan Anandan also participated in this round.

Following the round, Krishna Lakamsani and P S Sreekanth will join Explara’s board as Director and Observer, respectively. The company will use funds for making debut in single theatres and multiplexes in the movie segment.

Currently, Explara claims to have 10,000 suppliers on board spanning across various events and activities in multiple cities. Recently, the company added outdoor activities and the F&B industry. It claims to process 30,000 tickets on a monthly basis.

“Explara has great potential for growth in the city experiences markets,” says Krishna Lakamsani, who led the investment at Hyderabad Angels.

With inventory across various genres, Explara has positioned itself as ‘city experience marketplace’ and integrated it with personalized recommendations based on user-interest topics, location, and social graphs.

In an earlier interaction with YourStory this year, Explara had claimed to grow from ~7000 events in FY 2014 to ~32,000 events in FY 2015. The number of transactions has grown from 58,000 to 103,000. Explara aims to become profitable at EBIDTA level by the year end.

The company acquired IndianStage, an online event ticketing platform catering to art and theater lovers, in April this year.

Explara’s CEO Santosh Panda said,

Explara is getting access to single theatres and multiplexes in the movie segment to offer movie ticketing as a curated experience along with F&B and travel. With this, Explara will further grow its ‘City Experiences Marketplace’ to offer movie ticketing as well.

YourStory’s take

With this round, Explara is aggressively focusing on online movie ticketing which is currently considered as Rs 1,500 crore opportunity. Nearly 3.6 billion movie tickets are being sold in India every year and with growing penetration of Internet and smartphones, the industry is poised to grow many folds in the next few years.

As of now online movie ticketing space is dominated by BookMyShow. However, now it will face competition from Explara. SAIF Partners funded BookMyShow also offers tickets for sporting events like IPL, Formula One, plays and music concerts among others. The company claims to have 40% of its revenues from non-movie events.

Explara competes with BookMyShow, BookMyEvent, Kyazoonga, TicketGenie, MeraEvents among others. Globally, online movie and other entertainment event-centric startups like Ticketmaster and Fandango have demonstrated massive scale and India expects to follow a similar growth pattern.

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