Seatwave Hires Former Lottery Exec

Joe Cohen, founder of U.K. ticket reseller Seatwave, has continued his team building by hiring a man who spent six years helping run the national lottery.

During his time at Camelot, which has run the U.K. lotto since it started in 1994, Richard Hurd-Wood started and grew its online business to the point that it brings in revenues of £370.4 million.

Cohen described him as “an accomplished leader” who has shown the ability to grow large consumer businesses in complex industries.

Hurd-Wood’s appointments as chief ops officer and U.K. managing director, roles in which he will report to Cohen, become effective immediately.

He will be responsible for operations, product and technology, in addition to taking over direct stewardship of the U.K. profit and loss account.

“He joins us at a critical stage in our development as Seatwave moves towards becoming a mainstream service for consumers across Europe,” Cohen explained in a statement.

Hurd-Wood, who has previously held roles at Dell, AOL and several other leading consumer technology companies, is the third big-hitter to join the secondary ticket-seller in the last couple of months.

Seatwave recently announced the appointment of former News Corp Europe chairman Marty Pompadur as a non-executive director, while former Vodafone exec Aksel van der Wal has come in as chief financial officer.

Seatwave also has $25 million available for development – funding raised by Fidelity Ventures and largely supplied by existing investors including Atlas Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest.

The injection of funding came as the company, which is at loggerheads with the U.K.’s Resale Rights Society over payments to artists, cemented its leadership position in the European secondary ticketing market.

It claims to have more than 250,000 tickets available at any time and says it’s the most-trafficked ticket exchange Web site in Europe.

In 2007, Seatwave customers listed more than 1.7 million tickets. The company also launched ticket exchanges in Germany, Holland, Spain and Italy during the last quarter of the year.