Julia Hartz, Eventbrite Jesse Grant | CNBC Eventbrite, a provider of online ticketing services and personalized event invitations, announced plans to raise up to $200 million in an initial

public offering. The company, founded 12 years ago by Julia and Kevin Hartz, said in its prospectus on Thursday that it expects to debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker

symbol EB. Eventbrite is poised to jump into a growing pool of tech companies to hit the market this year, including consumer companies Spotify and Dropbox and business software providers

DocuSign, Zuora and Domo. Eventbrite generates revenue by charging creators for the tickets people buy to attend events. Last year more than 203 million tickets were issued through the

last year for just more than $200 million. Net revenue in 2017 increased an additional $27.5 million as a result of the acquisition of Ticketfly and another company, Ticketscript. In June

Eventbrite disclosed that a hacker had gotten a hold of Ticketfly data. Eventbrite disabled the service briefly in order to "contain the risk" of the event. As a result, Eventbrite

recorded a $6.6 million liability for potential costs associated with the incident, almost all of which was a reduction in revenue. Eventbrite sometimes pays fees to encourage creators to

release tickets through its service, sometimes exclusively. In 2017 it spent $10.4 million on these creator signing fees, up almost 51 percent year over year. As of June 30, Eventbrite had

1,016 employees. The company is based in San Francisco, and more than 10 percent of employees are based in Argentina. COMPETITIVE RISKS Eventbrite has a wide range of competitors, from large

ticketing companies like Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, to personal invitation providers such as Evite and Paperless Post. Additionally, Eventbrite says that it could face

competition from large internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter. "These competitors may be better able to undertake more extensive marketing campaigns and/or offer their

solutions and services at a discount to ours," Eventbrite said in the risk factors section of the prospectus. Facebook and Spotify are key distribution partners for Eventbrite, which

creates additional risks when those platforms make certain changes. For example, Eventbrite said that "Facebook removed a feature of its service that allowed creators to include

multiple hosts on a single event seamlessly across platforms, which negatively impacted certain music creators' use of the Facebook integration with our platform." Most of its

revenue flows through its own payment processing system, although some does go through third-party services like PayPal. Square will become Eventbrite's "exclusive payment

processing partner for all of our point-of-sale solutions" in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and new places where Eventbrite starts doing business, the company said.

Like Snap and many other internet companies, Eventbrite relies on a third party to operate its computing resources, rather than running its own. It has an agreement to spend $12.5 million on

cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, which runs between January 2018 and December 2020. Eventbrite's biggest shareholder is Tiger Global, which owns 21 percent. Sequoia

Capital owns 20 percent of the shares and the Hartzs own a combined 17 percent. Goldman Sachs is leading the offering, along with J.P. Morgan, Allen & Co. and RBC Capital Markets. _—

CNBC's Ari Levy contributed to this report._ _Disclosure:__ CNBC parent NBCUniversal is an investor in Snap__._