It was a small charity bingo night in Wagga Wagga a decade ago that tested whether a ticketing platform focused on social enterprise could work.
Adam McCurdie co-founded Humanitix in 2016 with his childhood friend Josh Ross with a view that the ticketing market could be transformed into an “engine for good”.
The idea was that surcharges and fees added to the top of a ticketing purchase could be redirected towards charity donations if the start-up could tap into the flow of billions of tickets sold every year.
McCurdie says it started small — bingo nights like the one in Wagga Wagga, yoga retreats, dating events and even a competition based on predicting where a Speckle Park cow would defecate in a field — to build its reputation and experience. “We’ve done thousands of events which enabled us to build out to bigger and more complex things,” he says.
Last month, Humanitix handled the 120,000 tickets for the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, which is a landmark for an Australian company that remains a small player in a market dominated by huge groups such as Live Nation in the US and Ticketek Entertainment Group in Australia.
There is ample opportunity. Market research company SNS Insider estimates that global event ticketing sales were worth US$77bn in 2025, up from US$73bn in the previous year, and are forecast to rise to US$107bn by 2032. Even a small slice of this market would be enough to make a significant contribution to the company’s plan to generate donations for charitable causes.
Humanitix is ranked at 157 in the latest FT/Statista High-Growth Companies Asia-Pacific list. Its revenue has more than tripled since 2021 to US$14mn in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate of 55 per cent.
The company so far has donated A$20mn (US$14mn) to social causes including philosopher Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save, the Yalari programme for indigenous Australian school children, and reading and coding charities. In 2025, it processed 19mn tickets on behalf of almost 285,000 events.
In contrast, larger rival Eventbrite sold more than 83mn tickets to more than 4.7mn events in 2024, generating net revenue of US$325mn, before it was sold last year to AOL-owner Bending Spoons.
McCurdie credits the company’s growth with its non-profit structure which has enabled it to develop functions — such as enhanced features for visually impaired ticket buyers who have struggled with traditional systems — without worrying about the return on investment. “Non-profit means no private equity, no shareholders . . . less people breathing down your neck to charge more. None of those brutal pressures are on us,” he says.
Humanitix, which was partly funded by software company Atlassian’s venture arm in its early days, has turned its attention to overseas markets having expanded into North America and more recently the UK, where it has established a base in Edinburgh.
The company opted to make the festival city its UK home over Bristol after receiving a £325,000 grant from the Scottish government. McCurdie says that the fledgling UK operation is already doing well.
Humanitix has gone head to head with rivals including Eventbrite and Moshtix at the “self-service” end of the ticketing market where event organisers handle the creation and management of ticket sales.
High-growth companies Asia-Pacific
This feature is part of the High-growth companies Asia-Pacific Special Report.
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Iain Robertson, a member of Australian tribute act Stone The Roses, used Humanitix for ticketing for a recent show after becoming frustrated with a rival platform that is often used for smaller gigs in Australia. “It was the simplicity and velocity that worked for us,” he says of the switch to Humanitix.
But the stakes are getting bigger for the start-up. The National Western Center in Denver, a large event space used for agricultural events, trade shows and concerts, allows organisers to choose between Humanitix, Live Nation and AXS, a subsidiary of AEG that operates the O2 in London, for their ticketing requirements.
McCurdie says Humanitix has been chosen for about 10 events in the past seven months and has been able to outcompete its much larger rivals through lower fees.
He says that model — allowing event organisers to choose which ticketing platform to use — could work well for venues that have been publicly funded and are not tied to exclusive arrangements with Live Nation and AEG.
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If Humanitix continues to grow and the size of the events using its platform gets bigger, McCurdie says it has no intention of converting to a for-profit model.
“That would be lame,” he says. “We have no interest in this being a traditional commercial venture. This is what we want to do with our lives, not chase an exit,” he says.