KNOT Technologies raises $1m pre-seed led by A15
KNOT is building an ticketing and access control platform.
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KNOT Technologies has raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by A15 to scale its AI-native ticketing and access control infrastructure. The company aims to rebuild how identity, distribution, and value flow at live events.
For decades, ticketing has run on legacy rails that leave organisers blind to demand, fans exposed to fraud, and billions of dollars leaking into unregulated resale markets.
KNOT’s founders, with prior experience at Meta, Goldman Sachs, and Mubadala, spent months conducting structured research with rights holders, venues, and operators across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The findings were consistent across every region: legacy systems offer limited visibility, secondary markets capture revenue organisers can’t track or control, and fans are pushed toward unsafe resale channels.
After an early rollout, KNOT has already secured more than 50 enterprise customers and is now emerging from stealth.
“Ticketing has become a financial black hole, with value leaking into unregulated channels and no modern tools to prevent it. Organisers lack visibility and control and fans are paying the price. That is why we started KNOT, to unlock real economic value and rebuild trust between businesses and their customers,” said co-founder and CEO Ahmed Abdalla.
“We invested in KNOT because the team is tackling a complex global problem with a genuinely novel approach. Their technology has the potential to reshape how trust and identity work in ticketing, and we believe they are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation,” said Karim Beshara, founder and managing partner at A15.
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This is a really interesting framing of the ticketing problem. What strikes me is how they're positioning the secondary market stuff not just as a bussiness model issue but as an infrastructure failure. I use to think resale markets were just arbitrage, but the 'financial black hole' angle makes sense when you realize organizers literally can't see where value is going. Building visibility into the system from the ground up feels like the rightapproach.