2023 Creative Industries winner

Humanitix: the golden ticket to export success

The Rocks (Gadigal Country), New South Wales

Humanitix is a social enterprise ticketing platform. It donates 100% of its profits to charity with a focus on funding educational charities across the world. 

Humanitix's story

Humanitix is giving kids across the world a chance at a brighter future.

This ticket-booking platform donates 100% of its booking fee profits to children’s educational charities. Since launching in 2016, the Australian Export Awards Creative Industries winner has donated more than A$6.5 million to these causes.

‘We, and the public, were sick of the large, greedy ticketing platforms charging crazy fees and providing terrible customer service,’ says Director and Co-CEO Josh Ross.

‘We decided to reimagine ticketing as a public good whereby we provide an amazing service and use our profits to help the world’s most disadvantaged children, in Australia and abroad.’

Booking fees for good

Humanitix is currently focused on literacy and life-skills programs for girls from low-income backgrounds.

It is also a major funder of First Nations-focused educational charities. This includes Yalari, a charity helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in rural Australia to access world-class secondary education.

Providing access for all

Humanitix is also improving accessibility for people with disabilities.

The platform has built first-of-its-kind accessibility inclusion tools into its ticketing platform and administrative back-end.

This addresses challenges spanning sign language interpretation, to screen readers for vision impairments, and wheelchair accessibility.

Global clients great and small

Humanitix exports to Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US.

Its customers range from local and international government bodies to corporate events companies, non-profits, schools and universities, as well as small community event organisers.

‘We have tens of thousands of events on the platform at any point in time,’ says Ross. ‘These range from 40,000-person music festivals to tiny 10-person yoga workshops.’

Scaling Humanitix in North America

A major focus for Humanitix in the past 12 months has been scaling in North America. In just 2 years, it has achieved a 500% growth in US ticket sales.

Driving this growth is substantial funding from existing partners including Atlassian. This has seen the company double its headcount and put more resources into developing export markets. 

A partnership with the State of Colorado has also been fruitful. A press release on Humanitix from the state’s governor led to a swarm of media attention and more than 1,700 US-based clients. The state also gave the company a generous financial incentive to locate its US headquarters in Denver.

‘We’ve also received some strong incentives and public relations support for our US operations, thanks to Austrade,’ says Ross.

Booking a bright future

Humanitix is currently raising further funds to accelerate its global expansion.

With Austrade’s support, it also plans to establish offices in Canada and the UK in 2024. Its pioneering technology will continue to be built and maintained in Sydney.

‘Our next market is the UK. We are in the process of opening an office in Edinburgh,’ says Ross. ‘Strategically, we’re focusing on English-speaking markets first.’

Built into the current raise is additional resources to account for the complexity of and compliance required for the expanding operations.

‘We are adding depth to our finance and accounting team, as well as doubling our product and developer teams,’ says Ross. ‘This will ensure our global infrastructure remains stable and scalable while continuing to win on features.’

Creative Industries finalists

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