KNOT Technologies Raises $1M Pre-Seed Led by A15

AI-native ticketing and access control startup KNOT Technologies has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by A15 to scale its infrastructure and take on fraud in live events. The company, now emerging from stealth after an early rollout with over 50 enterprise customers, says ticketing’s core rails have failed organisers and fans for decades.

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. "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," co-founder and CEO Ahmed Abdalla said.

"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," co-founder and CTO Hussein ElBendak said.

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," said Karim Beshara, founder and managing partner at 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.