# Live Event Marketing Startup Hive Raises $27 Million USD in Series B Funding > Kitchener-Waterloo software startup Hive announced a $27 million USD Series B round from Frontier Growth, consisting mostly of secondary capital. - Canonical URL: https://coreiten.com/en/article/hive-series-b-27m-usd-from-frontier-growth - Language: en - Section: Business - Author: Sami - Published: 2026-10-25T20:55:25+03:00 - Modified: 2026-10-25T20:56:55+03:00 - Publisher: CoreITen (https://coreiten.com) - Keywords: Hive, Frontier Growth, Avenue Growth Partners, Mailchimp, Y Combinator, Velocity --- Kitchener-Waterloo-based software firm Hive announced $27 million USD (nearly $38 million CAD) in equity Series B financing on October 21 from Frontier Growth, an investment firm based in Charlotte, North Carolina. After 12 years in operation and two major business pivots, the startup believes this Hive Series B gives it the scale and partner needed to advance its live event marketing platform. The vast majority of the new funding is secondary capital used to almost completely buy out Hive’s first institutional investor, Washington, DC-based Avenue Growth Partners, which led the company’s $7 million USD Series A round in 2023. While Hive has raised roughly $35 million USD to date, most of that total has been secondary capital. Co-founder and CTO Patrick Hannigan declined to disclose the exact financial breakdown or the company’s latest valuation in an interview with BetaKit. A small portion of the Series B consists of primary capital meant to support product development and go-to-market plans. ### Partnering with Frontier Growth According to Hannigan, Hive has hovered around breakeven for years. He told BetaKit that the main goal of the transaction was partnering with Frontier Growth for its live events experience and its track record of helping vertical software businesses scale. > “This isn’t a venture investment. This isn’t the, ‘Oh I hope there’s [a] 100x kind of opportunity [bet].’ This is a sustainable, intentionally-built business … We continue to chug along, but now we get to do it with somebody who’s seen companies our size go to the next level [many] times.” > > Patrick Hannigan, Co-founder and CTO, Hive Frontier Growth founding partner Andrew Lindner is joining Hive’s board of directors as part of the deal. Lindner said in a statement that the startup has accomplished “something rare in vertical software” by building a product deeply embedded in client revenue and compounding that advantage through network effects and proprietary data. He added that the large live events market is underserved by generic tools and is shifting quickly toward automation, putting Hive in a position to lead that transition. ### A Marketing Platform for Live Events Hive provides a platform that Hannigan has compared to a Mailchimp built specifically for live event promoters and venue owners. The software serves clients ranging from small bars in remote areas to major city arenas. It connects often fragmented fan purchasing data with email, text, advertising, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Clients can then use AI to automate core marketing tasks, better understand their audiences, and increase ticket sales. The 75-person company currently serves more than 1,600 festivals, promoters, and venues, offering what BetaKit describes as a sticky, revenue-generating “communication engine” that has helped clients sell over $1 billion USD in tickets to date. Hannigan claimed that Hive’s annual recurring revenue is now “well past” $10 million USD. ### From University Lab to Pandemic Recovery Hannigan and co-founder and CEO Ian Roberts started Hive in 2014 as a ticketing business while studying in a University of Waterloo computer lab. That same year, the company joined the university’s Velocity incubator and Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator (YC), raising a $750,000 USD seed round from YC, angel investors, and small funds. Struggling to raise additional funding over the following years, the team went through several pivots, including an attempt to build analytics and engagement tools for musicians. Hive eventually found product-market fit around 2019 with marketing software tailored for music venue owners. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Hive lost 60 percent of its revenue almost overnight. Hannigan told BetaKit that the startup, which had eight employees at the time, stayed the course because they were “scrappy Canadians.” Roberts told BetaKit via email that the co-founders believed in their product, wanted to support their customers, expected live events to recover, and had enough profitability entering the pandemic to avoid layoffs. Hannigan added that the team kept the business running and entered a strong growth trajectory once the live events industry consolidated and rebounded. Although most of Hive’s customers are in the United States, 70 percent of its workforce - including most of its engineering team - is based in Canada. Hannigan credited the company’s staying power to those Canadian roots, saying he believes his team is grittier, more efficient, and lasts longer than others. ## Sources - [betakit.com](https://betakit.com/live-event-marketing-tech-startup-hive-brings-on-frontier-growth-with-series-b/)