Sports management company Procam International Pvt. Ltd. has picked up a 26% stake in Eventjini, an online event registration and ticketing solutions company, for an undisclosed amount.
Procam, which has organised half and full marathons in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru, said the deal will help runners interact and communicate with the organisers and have their queries addressed. Chennai-based Eventjini, run by Eventus Software Services Pvt. Ltd, will now serve as a one-stop shop for registrations, bibs, race updates, run club information and travel packages, among others.
Vivek B Singh, joint managing director at Procam, told VCCircle that the proprietary technology Eventjini is putting together for Procam will benefit the ever-growing running community.
Eventjini was founded in 2011 by Sandilya Venkatesh, a serial entrepreneur who had earlier started Cepios Software Solutions and Paytel Systems.
The tie-up between Eventjini and Procam will make registrations faster by automating the workflow across all stages. This includes managing registration servers, workflow, insights, runner profiles, corporate registrations and offline registrations, at-venue registrations and processing of runner bibs.
Venkatesh said Eventjini’s advanced technology helped applicants complete the registration process for this year's Mumbai marathon in less than four minutes on average.
Industry observers say events’ ticket sales management is turning out to be a big opportunity, particularly in the wake of the increasing numbers of sports events in India.
Vineet Khurana, vice president of operations at Chandigarh Angel Network, which has invested in firms such as on-demand concierge services Qlivery, e-commerce returns platform JumboBasket and social learning platform Eckovation, said the event ticket sale segment is a huge opportunity with market size of $2 billion in India and $100 billion worldwide.
“A focussed player in this segment may serve areas such as business and technology, sports, entertainment, activities and interest, adventure etc., and has the potential to be a market leader with good value proposition and go-to-market strategy," Khurana said.
Sports management startups have garnered a lot of investor interest lately. Last week, Singapore-based Agnificent Platform Technologies Pte. Ltd, which runs Khel Now, a crowd-managed platform that aims to bring sports-related content and social networking together, raised $350,000 from Anglian Omega Network. Anglian had also invested in Leh Leh Sports, a startup that addresses problems faced by people who want to engage in sports activities.
Prior to that, sports management and marketing company IOT Sporting Aspirations Pvt Ltd launched a fund to back sports startups exclusively.
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