BookMyShow now has a majority stake in Pune-based DIY event platform Townscript
BookMyShow today announced that it has made an undisclosed strategic investment in Pune-based Townscript, a do-it-yourself (DIY) event registration and ticketing platform. BookMyShow now has a 75 percent majority stake in Townscript, although the latter will continue to function independently. With this strategic investment, BookMyShow intends to venture deeper into the B2B event organisation category.
In a press statement, Ashish Hemrajani, Co-founder and CEO of BookMyShow, said that they discovered the perfect match with Townscript. He also said that founders Sachin Sharma and Sanchit Malik have shown great drive and charted an aggressive growth path for the company. “We are eager to share our learnings as well as market and product expertise in this space, to help Townscript continue to scale,” he added.
Founded in 2014, Townscript caters to the ticketing and registration needs of small- and medium-scale events.
Sachin mentions that this investment brings in a good synergy of interests in the event booking space. “BookMyShow are category leaders, and working with them will give us deeper penetration into the market,” he says. He adds that this investment will help the team build a stronger product line in terms of improved design, a better analytical platform, and better web check-in solutions.
Adding to this, Sanchit said that the investment by BookMyShow will help Townscript move across different geographies faster.
The platform enables organisers to set up a dedicated ticketing and registration page within the website and app and perform a wide variety of tasks like communicating directly with the attendees, transferring or refunding tickets, collecting payments, tracking event progress using real-time analysis, and even offering promotional discounts.
The platform also helps users discover events through SEO-optimised listings, targeted email campaigns, and event categorisation based on genre and location.
Till date, Townscript claims to have provided services to over 12,000 events across India. The setup of the platform is free and there are no additional costs. The team follows a transaction-based revenue model, which is at 3.99 percent and Rs 10 per transaction, which includes the payment gateway fee.
After Hyderabad-based MastiTickets in January, this is BookMyShow’s second acquisition in 2017. No stranger to the acquisitions game, BookMyShow had acquired Chennai-based online ticketing player TicketGreen in 2013, followed by the purchase of a majority stake in Bengaluru-based social media analytics startup Eventifier in 2015 and the acquisition of Chennai-based fan relationship management (FRM) solutions provider Fantain Sports Pvt. Ltd. in 2016.
Last year, BookMyShow had raised its fourth round of funding of Rs 550 crore from Stripes Group and also ventured into the Southeast Asian market. While BookMyShow is a category leader, several players like Paytm are venturing into this space. Also, today there are more customers opting for home-based entertainment solutions like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix.