Now worth an estimated £68.7bn, the UK’s festival and live events sector has become big business.
But behind the scenes, the tech powering some of those ticket sales, payments and on-site experiences has quietly been undergoing its own transformation.
In April 2025, French event tech firm Weezevent acquired Manchester-based ticketing platform Kaboodle alongside Dutch firm Weeztix, in a deal designed to strengthen its European footprint, add cashless payments and expand its event offering.
But behind the deal sits a much longer story from pivots, a decade of product-building, and the near-collapse of the global events industry during Covid.
“It’s been a journey,” admits Tim Holmes, chief operating officer at Kaboodle. “But it’s been really satisfying watching it grow.”
But Kaboodle didn’t start out as a ticketing business, its tech story began much earlier in the world of student travel and festivals.
The people behind Kaboodle
Alex Cropper, now chief technology officer at Kaboodle, graduated from the University of Salford in the early 2000s.
One of his first tech roles was at LateRooms when it was still in its “very early stages”, watching it scale, mature, and eventually exit — an experience that shaped his desire for being involved in growing tech businesses.
“I’ve seen how the tech scene has evolved in Manchester, and how the tech has changed the way people use the internet. Ecommerce has evolved since then too, and software engineering has also moved forwards to support that growth and changes.”
By 2011, after working as a developer for various start-ups in the city, Cropper joined one of Kaboodle founder Gareth Cooper’s earlier businesses, a student travel specialist called Outgoing.
Overseeing a small tech team of three, the company was relying on a third-party booking system that simply wasn’t fit for purpose.
“We had a lot of problems at the time,” he explains. “Part of my role was to help manage that. I said: ‘Well, we could build our own booking platform and evolve it to deal with other clients and build on top of that’. I knew we could fix the bugs we were finding ourselves.”
Fast forward to early 2012, and they had their first iteration of a booking platform. And it quickly became clear it could become much more than just a tool.
“That ended up being the cornerstone of where we are today,” he says.
As founder Gareth Cooper expanded his events portfolio — including Austria’s Snowbombing festival — the technology was tested with real customers and real pressure. It forced the team to think differently about how people actually experience events, not just how they buy tickets.
By 2017, it was obvious the business had outgrown its student travel roots. Part of Outgoing was demerged and rebranded as Kaboodle, a name chosen to reflect the idea of selling the “whole kit and caboodle” of an event, rather than just a ticket.
That same year, Tim Holmes joined the business, bringing years of experience from across the events world.
At the time, the UK ticketing market was dominated by legacy platforms. Payments were slow, systems were rigid, and the focus seemed to stop once a ticket was sold.
Kaboodle took a different route and instead of treating the ticket as the end point, the platform was built around the entire “360” event experience — from including travel and accommodation to upgrades, add-ons and post-purchase upsells.
It started to catch on. Festivals talked to each other and Kaboodle picked up clients through reputation.
“We didn’t have a marketing department or a proper sales plan for a long time,” he admits. “It was very much through word of mouth and recommendations.”
As demand grew, the pressure on the tech grew with it. Kaboodle found itself handling traffic spikes that most ecommerce businesses only see once a year on Black Friday. “We deal with that kind of volume almost every week,” says Cropper.
Scaling the business and navigating a “tough” time for the industry
The tech team has since grown from three people to 24, with around 50 staff now based across the North West, spanning development, customer service and client management. A smaller team of around 10 in London focuses on sales, marketing and operations.
Despite being told more than once that tech talent would be “hard to find” outside the capital, Cropper says he found it to be the opposite.
“We’ve done a really good job of harnessing that talent here up North,” he explains.
But when Covid hit, the duo admitted it was a “tough” time for the events industry. Festivals were cancelled, rescheduled, then cancelled again as customers wanted refunds and reassurance.
“We were still doing a huge amount of work,” says Holmes. “We were cancelling festivals. Rearranging festivals. We were then cancelling the festivals that we rearranged and refunding people.”
Kaboodle furloughed staff and “lost people naturally” to other sectors, but the business kept going. Being majority-owned by Cooper meant there was space to think beyond the immediate crisis.
When the world opened back up, it became one of the “biggest years” for Kaboodle because the “demand was through the roof for events”.
“We’d sell out of an event, and the next one would be sold out immediately.”
It was then that they realised it was time to scale up the business “very quickly” as they were selling upwards of 4,000 tickets in just an hour.
“Thankfully, we were able to pick up where we left off before Covid and grew even more quickly. We were lucky.”
The deal – and the future
By 2024, Kaboodle wasn’t actively looking to sell. The team were exploring investment to scale up instead, with an eye on expanding the platform beyond music festivals into other areas, from attractions to cultural venues.
“We initially were looking for investment as we recognised there was a huge opportunity in both the UK and Europe. We were looking at European expansion and product growth as we had been quite set with music festivals and payments but there’s a whole world of stuff out there from attractions to museums.”
Then Weezevent got in touch. The French firm had been looking for a way into the UK market, which Holmes describes as “quite a closed shop”. Kaboodle’s platform, particularly its strength in payments and upsells, offered something different.
After Covid, payment plans had become a major part of the picture and what once accounted for just a small percentage of transactions now made up as much as 45% for some festivals.
“That flexibility really resonates with younger audiences,” Holmes says.
The two businesses already had a working relationship through Boomtown Festival, where Kaboodle handles everything from ticketing to on-site experiences and that history made the acquisition “less daunting” as they “knew how each other worked”.
Under the acquisition deal, which was for an undisclosed sum, Kaboodle continues to operate independently as a UK business. The focus so far has been on aligning their operations and sharing opportunities across sales teams, rather than sweeping change.
With different ticketing options across the group, further down the line, the plan is to “integrate platforms” to bring “all the features into one platform to have what we believe will be the most advanced festival ticketing platform around”.
The business is “still operating as we were before” but the plan is to “integrate the development teams” to make “the best use out of what we both have”.
“There’s a lot more the wider group can now offer that we can then bring into the UK market. Where we are growing now is not necessarily our previous ambition of going to Europe, instead we’re looking at the breadth of opportunity we have in the UK and the breadth of tech we can offer.”
As for what comes next, growth is still very much on the agenda.
“While it might not be Kaboodle going off and selling in France, the tech we build is going to be incorporated in that platform. So the stuff we’ve done around payment plans, post purchases, accommodation and booking can be rolled out across the business.
“Then we can really focus on those European festivals that haven’t had that opportunity to really drive that revenue before.”
