Only 17% of European festivals sold out in 2025. Innercrowd raises €750,000 to sell tickets through fans and WhatsApp

Innercrowd, a marketing tech company from The Hague, has raised €750,000 to take its fan-marketing platform to more countries. The company says it already works with more than a hundred festival organizers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Bulgaria and Poland. The investor named in the announcement is Hans Scheffer, a Dutch entrepreneur.

The timing is not accidental. Selling out a festival has stopped being the default in Europe. In IQ Magazine’s European Festival Survey 2025, only 17% of the festivals surveyed reported a complete sell-out. WOMAD Glasgow, a new Scottish edition of Peter Gabriel’s festival, was cancelled this summer after weak ticket sales. Innercrowd adds Lowlands in the Netherlands and Wacken Open Air in Germany to the list of big events that felt the slowdown this year.

Tickets sold inside WhatsApp

The product works at the start of the sales cycle. Fans who sign up for a presale or an early-bird offer get access to a shop inside WhatsApp and buy the ticket there, without leaving the app. AI agents run the one-to-one chats: they answer questions and nudge fans towards the purchase, so nobody from the marketing team has to be online. Innercrowd claims these campaigns convert on average 50% better than a presale sent by email. The figure comes from the company and there is no published methodology behind it.

Buying early is only step one. Once a fan has a ticket, the platform turns them into an ambassador. They share content, promote the line-up and bring friends along. According to Innercrowd, almost 32,000 active ambassadors have so far carried out more than 740,000 such actions for its clients, among them Exe Club, Soenda Festival and REBiRTH.

Benjamin Havenaar, co-founder and CEO, puts it simply: festivals are fighting for the attention of the same people, and paid ads are losing that fight. “A recommendation from a friend has a very different impact than yet another ad in your feed. That is a strength many festivals already have in their fanbase. We help them make much more active use of that loyalty,” he says. There is a side benefit for organizers, too. Fans produce photos and videos around the event, and the festival can reuse that content in its own channels instead of producing everything itself.

€12.5 million for the festivals, not for Innercrowd

Innercrowd says its approach has so far generated more than €12.5 million in ticket revenue for organizers. That money went to the festivals, not to Innercrowd. The company has not disclosed its own revenue.

The company was founded in 2024 by Havenaar and Job Vink, who is CTO. With the Amsterdam Dance Event starting this month, Innercrowd says the new money will go into expansion outside the Netherlands. Scheffer, the investor, argues the problem is the same everywhere: “Festivals have to work harder to build loyalty among their fans. Innercrowd shows that you can achieve this by getting much more out of the fans you already have.”

Ticketing has been a busy corner of the market this autumn. In September, Polish ticket seller eBilet won an International Sound Award for the sound its scanners make at the gate, and Meta is adding paid tiers to business profiles across its apps, WhatsApp included.