The ticketing industry has long been plagued by a “black market” problem, where legacy systems fail to track secondary sales and fraud remains rampant. Egyptian startup Knot Technologies is the latest player attempting to overhaul this infrastructure with artificial intelligence.
The company, headquartered in Sheikh Zayed, announced today that it has raised $1m in a Pre-Seed funding round led by A15. The capital will be used to scale its AI-driven ticketing and access control platform as it exits stealth mode.
The Problem: A Data “Black Hole”
Despite the rise of digital platforms, much of the global ticketing sector — spanning stadiums, museums, and entertainment venues — operates on architecture built before the mobile era.
According to Knot, this reliance on outdated tech makes it impossible for regulators to estimate true demand, leaving billions of dollars to be captured by unauthorized resellers.
“In the ticketing sector, economic value is lost in informal channels because of a lack of modern tools to prevent it,” says Ahmed Abdullah, co-founder and CEO of Knot. “Organizers lose control, and the public pays the price.
The Strategy: Pedigree and Proven Traction
Knot’s founding team brings institutional weight to the table, with previous experience at Goldman Sachs, Mubadala, and major MENA-based corporations. Their approach is based on months of research into the European and Middle Eastern markets, where they found that organizers were consistently unable to track revenue leakage or verify the identity of the end-user.
To solve this, Knot’s platform uses AI to:
- Verify identities at the point of entry and sale.
- Monitor demand in real-time to adjust distribution.
- Prevent unauthorized trading by locking tickets to specific user profiles.
The strategy appears to be gaining early momentum. Following a pilot phase, Knot has already contracted with more than 50 corporate and institutional clients.
The Investor View
A15, a prominent venture capital firm in the region, sees Knot as a fundamental infrastructure play rather than just a booking tool.
“We invested in Knot because the team is solving a complex global problem with a new solution,” says Karim Beshara, co-founder of A15. He notes that the company is “ideally positioned” to redefine trust in an industry dominated by incumbents that haven’t kept pace with AI developments.
What’s Next for Knot?
With $1m in the bank, Knot plans to:
- Accelerate product development: Enhancing the AI’s resilience against evolving fraud methods.
- International expansion: Moving beyond the Egyptian market to capture regional and global event organizers.
- Ecosystem integration: Embedding their tech directly into the existing software stacks of stadiums and museums.
As Hussein Al-Bandak, co-founder and CTO, puts it: “Fraud methods are evolving daily. Overcoming them requires building resilient and durable systems.”