Calgary-based Showpass plans to buy university campus engagement platform Bounce, expanding its presence into the university market.
The news: The agreement between the Queens University-founded Bounce and Showpass, Canada’s largest domestic live event ticketing platform, was announced on Tuesday and is expected to fully close later this month, according to Showpass CEO Lucas McCarthy.
McCarthy did not provide a dollar figure for the planned acquisition, but said the company has made a “sizable investment.”
From the source: “What we’re kind of pushing now is making sure our product speaks the same language as the verticals we’re servicing,” McCarthy said. “And consumers still get that generalized approach of being able to discover this wide range of things to do.”
Following the thread: Showpass acts as a digital hub for university campus-based events and ticketing. Talks between it and Bounce began late last year, and McCarthy says the company was excited to make the move into the university and college market. Showpass is currently finalizing the acquisition details, and McCarthy says no decision has been made about staffing changes that might happen because of the takeover.
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Yesterday’s announcement also coincides with the rollout of Showpass Campus, a new post-secondary-specific initiative that pools student programming, club, athletic, and arts events together into a single platform. That platform will be used to power Bounce’s clientele during the acquisition’s transition period.
Final thought: Showpass Campus is the first phase in a larger transformation for the Showpass platform that includes catering to distinct submarkets of the live event space like sports or convention events. Over the next year, McCarthy told BetaKit that Showpass is working toward building out other, distinct branches of the platform. That marks a shift away from a one-size-fits-all model, towards a hyper-specific platform that McCarthy said will do more to “speak the language” of the different areas within the industry.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Showpass.