Tickets for Good raises £3.9M to take fair ticket access global

Sheffield-based Tickets for Good has raised £3.9M led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance, with Shaping Impact Group, Finance Yorkshire, Leansquare and private investors joining, to take its discounted-ticket platform for key workers international.

Ticket prices keep climbing faster than wages – and yet the most interesting ticketing round of the week comes not from a dynamic-pricing lab but from a Sheffield company built to fill the seats nobody was selling. Below, I lay out the round, the machine behind it, and what a publicly backed northern fund sees in an impact ticketing platform.

£3.9M of mostly northern money

Tickets for Good announced on 7 September 2026 that it has raised £3.9M. The round is led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance, managed by Mercia Ventures as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, with Shaping Impact Group (SI3), Finance Yorkshire, Leansquare and private investors participating, per the announcement carried by Tech.eu and EU-Startups on the same day.

The company attached no stage label to the round. The money goes to international expansion and to the home front: around ten new jobs in Sheffield over the next three years, per EU-Startups.

“Live events should be available to everyone, especially those who give so much to our communities,” said Steve Rimmer, co-founder and CEO. “This investment reflects confidence in our team, partners and impact.”

A marketplace for the seats nobody sold

Tickets for Good gives NHS staff, teachers, charity workers and people receiving cost-of-living support free or discounted access to live events, using surplus inventory its event partners would otherwise write off. The company, founded by Rimmer and the late Neville Mosey, counts nearly 750,000 verified members and has distributed more than 1.25 million tickets to date, per its September 2026 announcement.

Revenue doubled in 2025, the company says, and the target is five-fold growth over the next three years. The platform has operated in the US since 2023 and is live in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany – with Robbie Williams and Edwin van der Sar as ambassadors, which is not a sentence most Sheffield startups get to write.

You can dig into how this round compares with the rest of the month on our fundraising tracker.

An $85bn market that grows at 3.55%

The market Tickets for Good sells into is enormous and slow-moving: global online event ticketing was worth $85.35bn in 2025 and is forecast to reach $105.17bn by 2031, a 3.55% CAGR for 2026-2031, per Mordor Intelligence (August 2026). North America took 38.2% of 2025 revenue; music concerts and festivals are the largest segment at 36.1%.

A 3.55% growth rate tells you this is a mature market where the incumbents compete on price extraction, not expansion. The under-used asset is the unsold seat – and the real costs of events teach the same lesson from the organiser’s side: inventory that goes unfilled is money already spent.

For scale, the round sits in the same band as the other early-stage cheques our desk logged this week, from AI Score’s £4M seed in London to Fluencify’s $4.3M pre-seed in Stockholm. The difference is that Tickets for Good is raising on trading history – revenue that doubled in 2025 – rather than on a product launch.

What impact capital is actually buying

So why does a publicly backed regional fund lead a ticketing round? Not for sentiment. “Demand for live experiences has never been stronger, however rising ticket prices are creating barriers,” said Chris Borrett of Mercia Ventures – which is an investment thesis, not a charity pitch. A verified audience of 750,000 key workers is distribution that most consumer platforms would pay dearly to build.

We in Europe tend to treat access as policy; in the US, the ticketing story of recent years has been dynamic pricing squeezing fans harder at every on-sale. The good news is that the counter-move is being funded here: a Sheffield company with northern public capital behind it, a Belgian investor in Leansquare at the table, and three continental markets already live.

What to watch is whether the model travels. The UK version is shaped around the NHS – a single, verifiable badge of who deserves cheaper culture. The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany draw those lines differently, and the five-fold growth target depends on redrawing them market by market.

The goal was never cheap tickets; it is a supply chain for access that pays event organisers for seats they were burning. Someone in Sheffield noticed first. Let’s watch who follows.