Humanitix founder Joshua Ross speaks to Forbes Australia about shaking up the ticketing industry across the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia—and earning a high-profile endorsement from Hugh Jackman along the way.
Humanitix was founded in 2016 by social entrepreneurs Joshua Ross and Adam McCurdie to disrupt the ticketing industry. The 100% for-purpose, Sydney-based company now sells 50,000 tickets around the world each day, and has donated $16.5 million of the proceeds from those sales to non-profit organisations. Over the last year, 3-million tickets were transacted in the US alone – Humanitix’ largest and fastest growing territory – and the company has ambitious plans to donate USD$100 million a year by 2030.
How is Humanitix different from other ticketing platforms?
For starters, Humanitix dedicates 100% of its profits to charity. In 2024 alone we’ve donated another $10 million to charities focused on literacy, education and alleviating poverty, all at no extra cost to anyone! Humanitix itself is structured as a charity, so there are no shareholders, which means we behave differently to our competitors.
How much do you charge for each transaction, and where do those funds go?
Our business model is that Humanitix is free for event organisers for both paid and free events. On paid tickets, we charge the attendee a booking fee which covers our costs to operate Humanitix, and then the profit margin left over is dedicated to charity. A big expense for us is our customer service as all our clients, including free event organisers, can get real human customer support from our local teams in North America, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Our pricing for paid tickets varies by region but typically falls between 1-2.5% of the ticket price excluding credit card fees.
How did Humanitix come about?
Co-founder Adam and I have been best friends since university. It took us a few more years to come up with Humanitix as an idea. Neither Adam or I had a background in event ticketing other than as a consumer, all we knew was everyone seemed to hate ticketing platforms and the industry had a reputation for over-charging and terrible customer service. Bingo, this is totally ripe for disruption, billions of dollars in annoying ticketing fees, what better mission than to lower those pesky fees, improve the experience, and repurpose the profits into sustainable funding for solving extreme poverty.
How many staff do you now have and are there plans to expand the team domestically and or internationally?
We have offices in Australia, the United States and New Zealand, with about 60 employee’s across the world. We’re growing in each office, but America is growing the fastest.
You won a Google.org award in 2018. How imperative was that to Humanitix being successful?
The Google Impact Challenge is a competition to find the best technology ideas to improve the world, with $1 million in prize money to help scale your initiative. In the same year, The Atlassian Foundation got behind us with a $1.2 million grant to help us scale. Both were vital to our success and gave us a lot of credibility and runway to grow.
As Humanitix is a nonprofit we don’t have investors, so we always knew that if the idea worked we’d need philanthropic capital to help us scale and get past break-even to become sustainable. I’m pleased to share we no longer need funding, we now dish it out to other nonprofits, we’ve given over $16.5 million to fellow nonprofits already, so it’s great it’s come full-circle and we are now paying it forward (and then some!)
How has the Atlassian Foundation been involved?
We’ve literally hit them up over 100x in the last 7 years asking for all kinds of help, free licences with Jira and their other products, important introductions and more. Humanitix wouldn’t look like it does today without Atlassian’s support, I don’t think we would have won the Google Impact Challenge without their endorsement and validation. Founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar know what we’re doing at Humanitix and they are supportive. They have got their plates full of other awesome work and have empowered their foundation team – who are our most important partner globally.
They’ve helped us so much more than just the cash. When we were hiring our Chief Technology Officer their foundation team organised for some of their very senior developers to do final technical interviews ensuring we got the right person for a mission-critical hire – this was huge, you get your CTO wrong as a tech-start-up and you’re as good as dead.
Humanitix has given $16.5 million to charity so far. Where do you hope to be by 2030?
A huge shout out to our team who have worked incredibly hard to make this a reality. We’ve been working really hard the past three years to set-up and scale in the USA, and I’m pleased to share its working, we’re already selling more than 5 million tickets a year there, and we expect in 2025 it will start making big donations too. By 2030 our goal is to be 10x larger, in USD, so donating over USD$100 million a year to our projects all from those pesky booking fees everyone hates…
How did the Hugh Jackman connection come about?
A decent chunk of our donations this year went to The Life You Can Save, It turns out that like us, Hugh is also a big fan of The Life You Can Save and the philosophy surrounding it. Hugh posted about the book earlier this year. So when he learnt what Humanitix is doing he naturally wanted to help amplify our impact so more event organisers find out about us. We were very excited to learn Hugh shares a lot of our passion for social enterprise and the intersection between business and impact, and we’re very grateful for him helping spread the word that now any event around the world can lower its booking fees while simultaneously helping children in poverty.
The Life You Can Save organisation was co-founded in 2013 by another Australian ex-pat, Peter Singer. Why did you choose that non-profit?
Peter Singer was doing a speaking tour with Think Inc a few years ago, and they were ticketing on Humanitix, the event organiser, Suzi, loves the Humanitix model and invited us to a dinner and that’s where we first met Peter (albeit we’d read his book years earlier). It’s an amazing philanthropic group dedicated to researching and finding the best front-line charities solving for global poverty. I highly recommend reading their book.
What other organisations benefit from Humanitix?
With respect to our donation model, we partner with a few leading philanthropic groups that do excellent research on front-line charities solving for our cause areas of poverty and education. It’s worth pointing out that these two social issues are intertwined in our minds – you’re unlikely to learn to read if you’re on one meal a day… So with this partnership model we rely on three key partners to help allocate our donations; The Atlassian Foundation, Partners For Equity, and The Life You Can Save.
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