• Egypt- and UK-based online ticketing platform KNOT Technologies has raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by A15.
• Founded in London in 2025 by Ahmed Abdalla and Hussein ElBendak, KNOT is building an AI-native ticketing and access control platform to tackle fraud, improve demand visibility, and reduce leakage into unregulated resale markets.
• The funding will support product development, international expansion, and deeper integrations across the live events ecosystem.

Press release:

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,” 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.