Booksy is a San Francisco-based online beauty marketplace for finding, booking and managing beauty and wellness appointments. The start-up has recently announced to have raised funding worth USD 70 million in its latest Series C financing round led by Cat Rock Capital, a Greenwich-based investment firm.
Founded back in 2014 by Polish entrepreneurs Konrad Howard and Stefan Batory, Booksy is a beauty marketplace for finding, scheduling and managing appointment related to beauty and wellness. The start-up is anchored by a Software as a Service business model for business management creating a convenient and easy bridge between customers and their beauty and wellness providers.
Coming back to the latest funding, Booksy saw participation from multiple existing investors including Sprints Capital, Enern, Open Ocean, Manta Ray Ventures, Hansen, Piton Capital, Zach Coelius and VNV Global.
Booksy is the solution to have a hassle-free scheduling experience for all your beauty and wellness appointments. The platform allows customers to find, book and pay for their appointments directly from within the Booksy application to the local beauty and wellness providers, making the overall experience efficient and extremely convenient. Not just this, the online beauty marketplace also offers wellness providers to then manage all of their booking, payments and customer base via the Booksy Biz application which is tailor-made for beauty and wellness businesses.
The pandemic has made it difficult for businesses to conduct offline operations, so business owners can now sell their beauty and wellness products online via the Booksy E-commerce application. The Polish founders have built a pretty useful and convincing business for a specific niche like beauty and wellness, covering all aspects and tangents of the business.
According to the company’s official profile, Booksy is solving a major crunch in the beauty and wellness industry by empowering small business owners across the globe with such inclusive business platforms. All services offered by the company provide relevant tools to businesses that enable them to run their operations smoothly and effectively. The overall business model that Booksy operates on saves a significant amount of time and effort when it comes to finding, booking and paying for beauty appointments. The app allows users to book their appointment at any time that suits them and about 38% of customers schedule their appointments after hours which in turn increases productivity and booking frequency of beauty and wellness providers, as mentioned on the company’s official website.
Booksy is headquartered in the United States and it has also expanded its target market across Poland, the UK, Brazil, Spain and South Africa. When asked about the latest funding round, the company mentions utilising USD 70 million to support fast-paced expansion plans across the entire North American continent. Other than this, the company is also looking forward to expanding its business across newer verticals, seeking our future acquisitions, non-organic growth opportunities and even scaling up its market-leading product to ensure providing the best user experience to clients and providers across the globe.
The company also claims that by employing Booksy’s software, beauty and wellness service providers can save up to 12 days per year. The application reduces blank appointments by 25% with automatic reminder service and in case of cancellation, the platform ensures smooth payment refunds for clients who missed their appointments.
Stefan Batory, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Booksy says that the company’s ultimate aim is to bring peace of mind to scheduling and giving time back for living life to the fullest. He further added that the pandemic has been rough for the beauty and wellness industry like most other businesses.
“It’s been a turbulent time for the beauty and wellness industry but we’re confident in its ability to come back from this, so it’s fantastic to see our latest group of investors share our optimism and vision. This latest round of funding enables us to reach even more salons and service providers across the US, and in all the regions we operate, which in turn helps them reach more customers. Providing a cost-effective way to offer, manage and increase digital bookings, reduce no-shows and give customers what they want could help make small businesses and entire industries more resilient.”
Furthermore, back in December last year, Booksy successfully acquired Poland-based Versum that offers a Software as a Service for efficient management of beauty salons, hairdressing salons and SPA. The deal was made despite the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affecting businesses all around the world.
The latest funding worth $70 million comes off from the company’s 1500% revenue increase in the past three operational years, according to the company and since its merger with Versum, the opportunities have expanded exponentially despite the onset of the pandemic.
