Punchup Live Lands New Strategic Investment Round Led By Marquee Ventures

EXCLUSIVE: Punchup Live, the technology platform empowering comedians and live entertainers to convert digital audiences into customers, on Tuesday announced a new round of strategic funding from investors across sports, media, and live entertainment.

Amounting to $2.1M, the round is led by Marquee Ventures, an early-stage fund spun out of the ownership group of the Chicago Cubs and other global sports assets. Reflecting a growing interest from sports and live-event operators in applying modern data infrastructure to the live entertainment economy, the investment is driven by a clear market gap in the availability of reliable data and tools to support high-stakes pricing and demand prediction.

For Punchup, what began as a request for ticket pricing guidance from an arena-level comedian quickly revealed a systemic issue across live entertainment. The company now aims to give performers a new level of visibility into their unique audience, pricing dynamics, and conversion performance, replacing intuition and guesswork with actionable intelligence.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Punchup Live and support what their team is building,” said Erik Hammer, Managing Partner at Marquee Ventures. “They have a clear vision for modernizing live entertainment from audience development all the way through event ticket sales, and we’re especially excited to work together to scale that vertically integrated vision.”

Punchup Live will work closely with its new investors to accelerate expansion of its creator-first ticketing platform, using the new funding to drive product innovation across ticketing, streaming, and analytics, expand strategic partnerships, and further invest in tools that help performers price shows smarter, tour more efficiently, and build deeper direct relationships with their fans.

“Comedians and creators are running real businesses, but they’ve historically lacked the market intelligence and infrastructure those businesses require,” said Danny Frenkel, CEO of Punchup Live. “This round brought together investors who deeply understand live audiences, ticketing, and content, giving us the ability to move faster in building a more transparent and predictable live entertainment economy.”

Founded by former Meta employees Frenkel and Alex Dajani, Punchup Live was profiled in a recent installment of our Comedy Means Business podcast. View the episode by clicking here.