Fresha, an appointment booking platform for the beauty, grooming and wellness industries has announced that it is now valued at over $640 million.
The company announced today that it has earned over $52 million in additional investment, extending the company’s recent $100 million Series C round led by General Atlantic , a leading global growth equity firm, to over $152 million.
The extension investment was led by Michael Lahyani and BECO Capital and included new contributions from Fresha’s existing investors General Atlantic, Partech, Target Global and FMZ Ventures.
The company has raised a total of $182m in investment to date, and will be used to expand its global community of partner salons and spas, with the goal of accelerating product development and driving marketplace bookings.
Fresha enables consumers to discover, book and pay for beauty and wellness appointments with local businesses via its marketplace, while simultaneously offering salons, spas, barbershops and beauty professionals an all-in-one platform to manage their entire operations with its intuitive free business software and financial technology solutions.
The software is designed to take the hassle out of day-to-day operations, allowing busy professionals to facilitate appointment bookings, point of sale, customer records, marketing automation, loyalty, product inventory and team management.
Fresha has seen unprecedented growth since the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses looked to bring their operations online and maximise their revenues by acquiring new customers through the platform’s consumer marketplace.
“We believe that professionals like barbers, stylists and therapists should be able to focus on their craft without having to worry about the daily hassles of running their businesses,” said Fresha co-founder and chief of product Nick Miller. “We’re committed to providing the very best product with a seamless customer experience at the lowest price point.”
Fresha founder and CEO William Zeqiri said: “Our ecosystem proposition differs from the more traditional incumbent software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers that focus on a single offering.” He added: “Business owners once had to utilize fragmented tools that attempt to solve operational challenges piecemeal; a business might use MailChimp for marketing, Wix for their website, Shopify to sell beauty products online, Square for payment processing, and other tools for calendar management and marketing. Our mission is to be the go-to one-stop-shop solution that addresses each and every pain point for the industry holistically, with an overarching vision to help connect the world to beauty and wellness.”
“Fresha has positioned itself as a major player in the beauty and wellness industry with a large and loyal customer base,” said Aaron Goldman, global co-head of financial services and managing director at General Atlantic, in a statement. He added: “We strongly believe in Fresha’s balanced strategy of providing one of the best products in the market at no cost to salons and then driving monetization via payments and value-added services.”