KNOT Technologies Emerges from Stealth with $1M Pre-Seed for Smarter Ticketing

KNOT Technologies  has raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by A15 to scale its AI-native ticketing and access control infrastructure. The company aims to rebuild how identity, distribution, and value flow in live events.

For decades, ticketing has run on legacy rails that leave organisers blind to demand, fans exposed to fraud, and billions of dollars leaking into unregulated resale markets. KNOT Technologies believes the problem is not inevitable. It is a data failure that can be fixed with AI.

KNOT’s founders, with prior experience at Meta, Goldman Sachs, and Mubadala, spent months conducting structured research with rights holders, venues, and operators across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The findings were consistent across every region: legacy systems offer limited visibility, secondary markets capture revenue organisers can’t track or control, and fans are pushed toward unsafe resale channels.

KNOT’s approach centres on an AI layer that authenticates identity, governs distribution, and tracks demand in real time. The founders say this enables event owners to restrict unauthorised transfers, cut out market leakage, and build a more transparent relationship between organisers and attendees.

After an early rollout, KNOT has already secured more than 50 enterprise customers and is now emerging from stealth.

“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. That is why we started KNOT, to unlock real economic value and rebuild trust between businesses and their customers.”

– Ahmed Abdalla, co-founder and CEO, KNOT Technologies 

“The technical challenge here is significant, which is what makes it so compelling. Fraud today is constantly adapting. Staying ahead of that requires engineering for resilience, not just scale, and building systems that learn faster than the threats they face. As we scale, the underlying technology has the potential to create value far beyond ticketing.”

– Hussein ElBendak, co-founder and CTO, KNOT Technologies 

A15, which led the round, sees the company as addressing a structural gap in a category 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. 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.”

– Karim Beshara, founder and Managing Partner, A15

With the new funding, KNOT plans to expand product development, grow internationally, and deepen integrations with partners across the live events ecosystem. The company aims to become the infrastructure layer powering the next generation of events, enabling organisers, venues, and fans to interact through more secure, seamless, and data-driven experiences.