London / Cairo – Egypt- and UK-based online ticketing platform KNOT Technologies has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by venture capital firm A15, as the company looks to scale its AI-native ticketing and access control infrastructure globally.
Founded in London in 2025 by Ahmed Abdalla and Hussein ElBendak, KNOT is developing a next-generation ticketing platform designed to combat fraud, improve demand visibility, and reduce revenue leakage into unregulated secondary resale markets.
The newly raised capital will be used to accelerate product development, support international expansion, and enable deeper integrations across the live events ecosystem, including organisers, venues, and operators.
For decades, the ticketing industry has relied on legacy systems that offer limited visibility into demand and distribution, leaving event organisers exposed to fraud and fans vulnerable to unsafe resale channels. KNOT Technologies believes these challenges stem from structural data limitations that can be addressed through artificial intelligence.
KNOT’s platform is built around an AI-driven identity and distribution layer that authenticates users, governs ticket transfers, and tracks demand in real time. According to the company, this approach allows organisers to restrict unauthorised resale, retain greater control over pricing and distribution, and establish more transparent relationships with attendees.
Prior to launch, the founding team—whose experience includes roles at Meta, Goldman Sachs, and Mubadala—conducted extensive research with rights holders, venues, and operators across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The findings consistently highlighted a lack of visibility in legacy ticketing systems and widespread revenue leakage into secondary markets that organisers are unable to track or control.
Following an early rollout, KNOT has already secured more than 50 enterprise customers and is now emerging from stealth mode.
“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,” said Ahmed Abdalla, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of KNOT Technologies. “We started KNOT to unlock real economic value and rebuild trust between businesses and their customers.”
Hussein ElBendak, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, highlighted the technical complexity of the challenge. “Fraud is constantly evolving, and staying ahead requires building systems that are resilient and capable of learning faster than the threats they face. As we scale, the underlying technology has the potential to create value far beyond ticketing.”
A15, which led the funding round, sees KNOT as addressing a fundamental gap in a market dominated by incumbents built before the mobile and AI era.
“We invested in KNOT because the team is tackling a complex global problem with a genuinely novel approach,” said Karim Beshara, Founder and Managing Partner at A15. “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.”
With the fresh funding, KNOT Technologies aims to position itself as the infrastructure layer for the next generation of live events, enabling organisers, venues, and fans to engage through more secure, seamless, and data-driven experiences.
