Tickets for Good, the Sheffield platform that hands unsold event tickets to NHS staff, teachers and charity workers for a small transaction fee, has raised £3.9m to expand abroad. It has moved more than 1.25 million tickets to about 750,000 members since 2022, which makes it the clearest evidence yet that an empty seat is an asset organisers are leaving on the table.
What was announced
The round, announced by lead investor Mercia on 8 September, was led by NPIF II, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II managed by Mercia Ventures, alongside Shaping Impact Group, Finance Yorkshire, Leansquare and private investors. The company says it doubled revenue in 2025, is targeting five-fold growth over the next three years, and will create ten jobs in Sheffield while pushing into new overseas markets. It already operates in the United States, which it entered in 2023 through the Comcast SportsTech accelerator in St Louis, and in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
The mechanics are simple. Event partners donate surplus tickets. Members sign up free, verify that they work for the NHS, a school or a charity, or that they receive Cost of Living support, and then pay a nominal per-ticket fee to claim seats. Tech.eu summarises the organiser side of the bargain as filling otherwise unused capacity and earning something from the people who turn up. Robbie Williams is an ambassador and, according to the Yorkshire Post, backed a £500,000 seed round in 2023; former Netherlands goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar and music entrepreneur Hans Brouwer are ambassadors too. Co-founder Steve Rimmer started the company with Neville Mosey, who died in 2023 aged 37.
Why would an investor fund free tickets?
Because they are not free, and because the alternative is worse. Mercia's investment director Chris Borrett tied the thesis directly to the price of tickets: demand for live experiences is strong, rising prices are shutting people out, and venues have worked out that a full room is worth more than a half-empty one. The same week, Glastonbury announced a record £408 ticket. Those two stories are the same story from opposite ends.
A seat that goes unsold has a value of zero the moment the doors open. A seat filled by a nurse who buys a drink, a programme and a T-shirt, tells three colleagues, and comes back next year at full price, has a value that is not zero. TheTicketingBusiness reports the company now has almost 750,000 verified members, which is a distribution list most promoters would pay for. The organiser pays nothing to reach it.
An unsold ticket is not saved money. It is a marketing budget you forgot to spend.
What this means for event organisers
Attendee engagement starts with the people who nearly did not come. Conference organisers rarely think of themselves as having "surplus tickets", but every event with a hard capacity and a soft final week has them. The median no-show rate across 1,070 events in PheedLoop's Event Data Lab report was 20%, rising to 28% for free events. Some of that is unavoidable. Some of it is seats that could have gone, at low or no cost, to students, early-career professionals, local charity staff or the speakers' own teams, all of whom are more likely to show up because somebody chose them.
Tired of Fee Announcements? Go Flat
eventcloud charges one subscription with no per-ticket fees, so platform news stops being budget news.
Reputation compounds. A key-worker allocation is a story a local paper will print and a sponsor will put in a deck. It is also the kind of thing a corporate event team can point to when procurement asks about social value, which in the UK public sector is now a scored line in the tender.
Watch what your platform charges for a zero. This is where the pricing model matters. A donated or heavily discounted ticket is still a registration, and several platforms bill per registrant regardless of price. RegFox charges $0.99 per free registrant on its Standard plan, Cvent bills per registrant per event, and Bizzabo's base licence only makes sense at three seats and $17,999 a year. On a percentage model like Eventbrite or Humanitix a free ticket is free, but a £5 goodwill ticket still pays a fee out of proportion to its price. A flat subscription is the one model where the marginal cost of the 5,001st attendee, paying or not, is zero. That is eventcloud's model: unlimited events, tickets and registrations on one per-user price, with revenue settling into the organiser's own Stripe account, so the bill is the same whether 500 people or 50,000 walk through the door and whether they paid £408 or nothing. Registered charities, state schools and religious non-profits can also apply to use it free for life for up to three users. To be clear about the edges: it is priced per user, it is an in-person platform, and it has no distribution list of its own, so the audience is one you bring.
The bit nobody mentioned: the seat is not the point
The interesting number in this deal is not 1.25 million tickets. It is 750,000 verified identities. Tickets for Good has, almost as a by-product, built a consented, verified database of key workers who like going out, spread across five countries. That is a data asset first and a charity second, and it explains why a venture fund rather than a foundation wrote the cheque.
It also raises a question organisers will face more often as ticket prices rise: who owns the relationship with the attendee who came in through a side door? If a third party fills your empty seats, the person in the seat is on their list, not yours. Some organisers will be fine with that. Others will want to run the same kind of allocation themselves, from their own registration form, so the nurse who came for £4 this year is in their own data next year when she is deciding whether to pay full price. Either answer is legitimate. Not asking the question is the mistake.
Rimmer says the founders started with a belief that unused tickets could do something good. In the same week Glastonbury broke £400, an industry busy raising prices has just funded the company that catches what falls off the top. Both trends are real. Organisers should plan for both.
