Cinema ticketing software
Choovie builds distribution and ticketing software for cinemas. It sells underused session capacity through partner and corporate reward channels, helping exhibitors fill empty seats without discounting at the box office.
Shane traded electricity derivatives for Queensland's largest private generator, then created Australia's first hedge fund for renewable energy certificates. Cinema pricing was the same problem, with fixed prices leaving off peak seats empty. Early research meant walking into Melbourne cinemas with Sonya Stephen to count how many people were there. They got kicked out. Choovie came from that, selling cheaper seats at quiet sessions.
Sonya has thirty years across investment banking, commercial management and the not for profit sector. She advised private clients at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and UBS. Sonya ran global product development at Computershare from Melbourne and Boston, and led the Cathy Freeman Foundation as chief executive. She co-founded Choovie in 2015 and is its chief executive, putting movie rewards inside loyalty programs run by CBA, Optus and Mastercard.
Shane's an economist. He and Sonya once paid full price to sit in an empty cinema, just the two of them, and he couldn't let the supply-demand mismatch go. That itch became Choovie.