Hometown Soccer Holdings selects vivenu as its ticketing platform partner. Nov 12, 2026, 09:05 ET One Digital and Data Infrastructure Across Hometown Soccer Clubs, Designed to Put Fans First NEW YORK, Nov. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Hometown Soccer Holdings (HSH) has selected vivenu, the AI-native, end-to-end ticketing platform for live entertainment, as its exclusive ticketing partner in a long-term agreement. The partnership puts the MLS NEXT Pro clubs operated by Hometown Soccer Holdings on a unified ticketing platform, giving the venture one ticket sales hub across North America while each club keeps its own brand and user-friendly interface to support a seamless fan experience. Hometown Soccer Holdings, a strategic partnership between KKR and MLS to centralize and scale MLS NEXT Pro's commercial operations and launch new clubs in cities across North America, is building a centralized digital platform to empower multiple clubs with modern ticketing technology at its core. vivenu was chosen because its API-first, white-label infrastructure runs ticketing, data, and integrations centrally while every club sells under its own identity, in its own market, with its own pricing and inventory. As new clubs and venues come online, they benefit from the same centralized digital and data excellence from day one. vivenu's AI will run ticketing operations and surface revenue opportunities in real time to each of HSH's clubs. It also allows for the HSH platform and individual clubs to personalize fan experiences at the national and local level, with each club's operating team learning from the others at national scale while serving its own community. First-party fan data ownership and the centralized ecosystem give Hometown Soccer Holdings the insights to engage sponsors with value-added activations built directly into the fan experience, offering new opportunities for personalization. Hometown Soccer Holdings has built an executive team with leadership experience from top global sports and entertainment entities, which gives the venture the ability to choose the best partners available today. Equipping that team with the best tools for fan engagement that turns into measurable revenue was a priority. "We are building professional soccer clubs with real roots in local markets, and that begins with a fan's experience purchasing their ticket to a match," said Tom Glick, CEO, Hometown Soccer Holdings. "Serving our fans with tailored experiences, delivering consistently for them at a high standard across our clubs, and doing it with modern tools is essential. In vivenu, we've found a partner designed for and excited to go on this journey with us - a technology company that specializes in ticketing, that will provide efficiencies and build repeatable solutions as we add clubs and open new stadiums across the country. It's an exciting time for soccer, and the vivenu and Hometown Soccer partnership is being built to keep fans at the center of our sport's bright future." "What drew us to Hometown Soccer Holdings from the get-go was their ambition to turn better, more personalized fan engagement into meaningful revenue," said Simon Hennes, CEO of vivenu. "That is what the vivenu platform is built for. Every club keeps its own brand and owns its own data. Ambitious organizations want exactly that today. We are energized by the popularity of soccer in the United States, and look forward to applying our learnings from working with U.S. and European clubs to help fandom continue to grow." Travis Smith, Regional Vice President, Sports and College Partnerships, North America at vivenu, added: "vivenu is the ticketing platform at the core of Hometown Soccer Holdings' AI strategy, and we are excited to support leaders who will push the boundaries of innovation through their community of MLS NEXT Pro fan data." The partnership covers ticketing across all Hometown Soccer Holdings clubs and venues, including white-label checkout under each club's brand, season and group sales, multi-market reporting, real-time sales and attendance analytics, and direct integrations with the venture's CRM, marketing, and sponsorship tools. About Hometown Soccer Holdings Hometown Soccer Holdings is a professional soccer organization dedicated to bringing new clubs and purpose-built stadiums to cities across North America. Founded by soccer industry veterans Tom Glick and Chris Klein, whose careers span leadership roles at Manchester City FC, Chelsea, the LA Galaxy, Major League Soccer, and beyond. Hometown Soccer Holdings partners with MLS and KKR to grow the game in new communities. For more information, visit www.hometownsoccer.com. About vivenu vivenu is the fastest-growing end-to-end white-label ticketing platform in the world, trusted by over 1,100 premier event, sports, and venue brands like Stanford University, Schalke 04, HYROX, Fondation Cartier, the GRAMMYs, and Bad Bunny's Guinness World Record-breaking Puerto Rico residency. Positioned at the forefront of the AI-first fan engagement era, vivenu is the tech-leading infrastructure modern organizations require to transform ticketing from a cost center into a high-performance revenue engine. With an API-first architecture, vivenu provides a fully open ecosystem that lets top organizers customize and build on the platform, ensuring direct integration and complete brand ownership. This holistic approach captures significantly more data points than legacy competitors, providing the deep marketing insights needed to drive EBITDA margins through hyper-personalized upsells, cross-sells, and sophisticated sponsor integrations. Now a profitable business operating globally with 200 people across six international offices, vivenu serves as the core of the modern fan engine, giving organizations the data sovereignty and technical flexibility to maximize lifetime value and deliver a premium fan experience. SOURCE vivenu

Ticketers turning to AI to offer tour planning services. Several recent product launches have seen ticketing platforms move to open up troves of transaction data to help promoters and agents plan tours and price shows News By Ciaran Donnelly | 2 November 2026 Ticketers says "the sky is the limit" to how a spate of AI 'predictive intelligence' tools recently launched across the sector can advance the ways promoters and agents route and price live tours. In recent weeks, SeatGeek, Skiddle, and Vivenu have each launched services which they say can help tour planners by analysing patterns from historical ticket buying data. With this, the firms are introducing another source of data that agents and promoters can draw from when developing touring and pricing strategies, on top of in-house data analysis that is already widely used. As part of this trend, SeatGeek has launched a "small team" fielding inbound requests from tour planners enquiring about using its new TourIQ feature, says ArinMichelle Casey, director of partner services at SeatGeek. Years of selling tickets to concerts have left SeatGeek with "millions of data points" that it now wants to put to a new use by opening them up to tour planners, she says. "Between agents and promoters, they may leverage TourIQ to help them do the routing and the initial planning for a tour," explains Casey of SeatGeek's service. "They might have an artist in mind and say, 'we're debating between doing a couple nights in arenas or doing a stadium, so let's take a look and see the best venue fit by size and let's take a look at a couple different markets, and let's plot the tour'. Then it lets them see what the tour is worth." The launch of TourIQ comes as UK ticketer Skiddle also brings out Brightlights, which founders also describe as a "predictive intelligence" tool to "help venues, promoters, and talent buyers make smarter booking decisions". "Brightlights will give promoters access to the predictive insights needed to build better lineups and reduce financial risk. When promoters can match the right artists to the right audiences, it elevates the entire nightlife experience for fans, venues, and artists alike," says Duncan King, Skiddle's head of partnerships. Skiddle says Brightlights is designed to consolidate fragmented data from past bookings, echoing another tool launched by Vivenu in the same month, which the firm describes as letting tour organisers use AI tools to "ask questions about their live ticketing data and act on the answers". The three tools diverge in their offerings, however. Vivenu's tool differs from Brightlights and TourIQ by being a server that is accessible through AI tools including Claude and ChatGPT. Brightlights, meanwhile, aims to unite ticket data with other indicators including streaming behaviour, in its pitch to agents and promoters. Outside of tour routing, though, Casey says SeatGeek's TourIQ service can also help planning for individual shows, saying it can aid the process of scaling inventory into different price levels across a venue. "The sky is the limit as for how we can customise the application" With its history as a ticket aggregator before moving into primary sale, Casey says SeatGeek is moving towards promoter-side services because "we have such robust data about market clearing prices and what fans pay, when and where, and for whom". Indeed, she says, TourIQ is based on a dataset comprised of "everything that has ever happened on SeatGeek". Asked how a historical price dataset accounts for inflation and macroeconomic factors, Casey explains TourIQ uses inputs that measure the relative popularity of an artist compared to peers, and not just pricing numbers. When asked what the tool can add beyond data analysis already done by agents and promoters, she says these inputs allow TourIQ to be "cultural" as well as numerical. As a result she says, "we can work with the model any which way, so if a promoter came to us and said, 'I've got this artist, I want to do this stadium, and I need to make $6 million; can you scale it for me? We could". She adds TourIQ can also be used in the reverse direction, for example "if a promoter came to IQ Magazine and said, 'it's important to IQ Magazine that IQ Magazine keep the highest ticket price below a certain amount, but IQ Magazine want to maximise revenue; can you show IQ Magazine how to do it? Casey says SeatGeek is agnostic in terms of the different pricing strategies it can be used towards: "We will work with folks whose priorities run the gamut from, wanting to keep the prices as low as they can, and others that are more open to doing what would otherwise be done in the market." Proponents of the recent launches say AI tools of this nature can benefit tour planning with advanced pattern recognition that can feed strategy decisions. "Brightlights gives talent buyers the resources needed to book acts intelligently and reinforce their decision-making without taking the human element out of the process," says Brightlights co-founder Dan Leizell. SeatGeek's Casey echoes this, saying: "Two artists that might seem very different might have surprisingly similar fan behaviour and sales trends. That's why it's so compelling to have this robust dataset because it's reaching so far into pockets that we wouldn't think to look at if we were running these comparisons manually," she says. Speaking to the potential uses of ticket platforms' data for tour planners as the sector increasingly looks to open up this vertical, Casey says the idea boils down to saving time on "what might have taken us a few hours to do the maths, colour the map, get our highlighters and draw in the numbers, where you're getting maybe 35 price levels". She adds: "Some promoters prefer fewer price levels; some have no preference. The sky is the limit as for how we can customise the application." Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ's free email digest of essential live music industry news.