Amazon-backed daily deals company LivingSocial has bought Korean rival TicketMonster. Terms were undisclosed, however news provider FT Tilt said analyst estimates before the deal had placed TicketMonsters’s value at KRW300bn ($286m).
TicketMonster was founded in 2010 and has more than 2 million members in Korea and Malaysia.
In July LivingSocial reportedly appointed US-based banks Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase and Germany-based Deutsche Bank as the lead underwriters in a potential flotation, according to news provider the Wall Street Journal.
LivingSocial raised more than $400m in April from an undisclosed mix of new and existing public and private investors. The round valued LivingSocial at about $2bn, according to press reports, and news provider Fortune said mutual fund manager T Rowe Price and venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners had invested. This sum took the total raised by LivingSocial to more than $600m.
Amazon invested $175m in the company in December. The company also raised $25m in a series B round in March last year in a round led by venture firm US Venture Partners, with Grotech Ventures and Revolution, AOL founder Steve Case’s fund. Grotech links to a Fortune report on its website saying that Grotech sold some of the shares from the $5m series A round it led into the company in 2008, for about $200m recently.