Flicket is running $350 million worth of global events from a surf town

The number that matters

Forget the pitch-deck projections that usually accompany tech stories. Flicket, the Mount Maunganui digital ticketing and visitor management platform, is on track to process $350 million in transactions across 4,000 events in 2026. That is current operating scale, not ambition, and it is flowing through software built and run from a beachside suburb rather than a metropolitan tech hub.

The scale is real enough to have earned recognition. On 7 August 2026, Flicket won the ASB Bay of Plenty Exporter of the Year Award, a category that requires more than five years of international operations and total annual revenue above $5 million. Flicket clears both bars comfortably.

Turning organisers into their own ticketing company

Flicket is not a consumer app competing for eyeballs. It is a B2B platform that hands event organisers control over the customer data, revenue streams and fan engagement that the traditional intermediary model captures for itself. That is the whole play, and it targets a genuinely hated part of the events economy.

“No one likes ticketing companies. We very much understand that, and everyone’s got horror stories of platforms crashing, not being able to get tickets and information not being clear,” co-founder and CTO Jimmy Barwell-Smith told the NZ Herald in September 2026. The frustration among organisers who hand their customer relationships to a third party is exactly the gap Flicket fills, and it is the same gap that has drawn sustained antitrust scrutiny of Ticketmaster in the United States.

Barwell-Smith says the model solves the same problems it did eight years ago, “just at a bigger scale now”: organisers “wanting to know who their fans were, wanting to have better control over how their product was marketed, what data was collected.”

Glow-in-the-dark baseball cracked the US

The clearest proof of Flicket’s US scaling is Cosmic Baseball, a glow-in-the-dark touring sports attraction and one of the fastest-growing live formats in the country. Flicket powered the Cosmic Takeover Tour, which sold 750,000 tickets across 90 sold-out events nationwide. Barwell-Smith says the company expects to sell more than one million tickets with Cosmic Baseball over the coming year.

Beyond baseball, Flicket has powered New York Fashion Week and Las Vegas events alongside the McLaren Formula One team, and continues to expand across rodeo, college sports and live entertainment. At home its client roster has included Super Rugby, Laneway Festival and Dom Dolla’s New Zealand headline show.

Prove it locally, then export

Flicket was founded in 2018 by Ben Calvert and Barwell-Smith as what he calls a “weekend project.” In 2022, Idealog reported that co-founder Calvert built Flicket partly in response to concerns about ticket fraud from resale platforms such as Viagogo. Back then it was already selling millions of dollars of tickets across New Zealand, Australia and the US, with early partners including Super Rugby teams and NZ Hockey.

The expansion has been deliberate rather than reckless. Export awards judges praised Flicket’s “disciplined approach of proving its offering locally before expanding internationally”, a model that stands in pointed contrast to the move-fast-and-burn-cash reflex of much VC-backed US tech. ExportNZ called Flicket “a great example of the kind of ambitious, innovative company New Zealand needs more of.”

Why the postcode is the point

Flicket sits in Mount Maunganui, not Auckland, Wellington or San Francisco. That matters commercially, and it matters regionally. The Bay of Plenty shed 307 jobs in the March 2026 quarter, a 0.2 percent fall in seasonally adjusted filled jobs. A high-growth exporter creating skilled platform and engineering roles is a real counterweight to that softness.

It also lands inside a bigger trend. Writing in August 2026, Auror co-founder and chief executive Phil Thomson noted that New Zealand digital exports are growing two-and-a-half times faster than the wider economy, with the local tech ecosystem up more than sixfold in value since 2019, outpacing Australia, Ireland, Israel and Sweden. His argument is that digital exports deserve formal recognition as a priority sector. Flicket is what that sector looks like when it works, and it is working from a suburb most of its US clients could not find on a map. The next milestone, a million-plus tickets through one client alone, arrives within a year.

Sources

• Meet Flicket: Bay of Plenty ticketing company powering global events (2026-09-05)
• Flicket wins Exporter of the Year at ASB Bay of Plenty Export Awards (2026-08-07)
• The NZ economy may be approaching the next ‘gaming is bigger than wool’ moment (2026-08-03)
• Celebrating the Best of Bay of Plenty Exporting (2026-08-10)
• Business employment data: March 2026 quarter (2026-06-09)
• Rethinking the multi-billion-dollar ticket industry (2022-07-11)