Punchup

Punchup (Punchup Live, operated by PunchUp Technologies Inc.) is a New York-based technology platform for standup comedy and other live entertainment. For fans, it serves as a destination to watch comedy content, subscribe to individual comedians, discover new performers and find shows nearby. For performers, it combines content hosting, direct fan communication and ticketing in a single platform, adding analytics intended to show who and where an artist's audience is, how pricing dynamics behave and how well demand converts into sales.

The company hosts more than 5,000 hours of material, including short clips, full sets, specials and club footage, and offers premium content such as comedian Mark Normand's "Page to Stage" series, which follows a joke from initial idea to performance, for a fee. It debuted "Small Ball," a special from New York comic Joe List, on June 5, 2025. Beyond comedy, the company has stated plans to extend into music, magic and live-podcasting shows, and to build AI-powered tools for creators and venues alongside streaming and digital distribution features.

Punchup also publishes analysis drawn from its own platform data on topics such as ticket-purchase timing, the relationship between social follower counts and ticket sales, and differences between comedy and music touring patterns.

Founding story

Co-founder Danny Frenkel spent more than a decade at Meta working in advertising and data infrastructure, and was a long-time comedy fan who spent nights at New York's Comedy Cellar and briefly performed standup himself in San Francisco and New York. He cites a 2020 incident in which comedian Sam Morril had a problem with his Instagram account as crystallizing the distinction between an audience a performer owns and one that is effectively rented from a platform. In 2023 he co-founded Punchup with Alex Dajani, a Meta and Apple software engineer, to give comedians tools to own their audiences, sell tickets and monetize directly. The company says its focus on pricing data emerged from a request for ticket pricing guidance from an arena-level comedian, which surfaced a wider gap across live entertainment.

Business model

Punchup operates a creator-first ticketing and content platform, earning revenue from a share of ticket sales, subscriptions and digital content monetization generated through its ticketing, streaming and analytics products, and it also sells premium content such as paid video series.

Revenue is generated by taking a share of ticket sales, subscription fees and digital content monetization on the platform, including paid premium series.

Traction

More than 5,000 hours of hosted material; over 55,000 ticket requests fulfilled as official ticketing partner for San Francisco's Stern Grove Festival; exclusive content from comedians including Mark Normand, Joe List, Zoltan Kaszas and Jordan Jensen; internal analysis of 344 headliner shows across five clubs showing 56% average capacity sold for Punchup headliners versus 40% for others.

Latest developments

In January 2026 Punchup announced a $2.1 million strategic round led by Marquee Ventures, an early-stage fund spun out of the ownership group of the Chicago Cubs, with participation from Social Leverage and Armory Films. The proceeds are earmarked for product innovation across ticketing, streaming and analytics, AI-powered tools for creators and venues, strategic partnerships, and pricing and touring tools for performers. CEO Danny Frenkel was profiled in Deadline's Comedy Means Business podcast and in a January 2026 media newsletter case study.