GlossGenius, a business management platform for beauty and wellness businesses, announced Tuesday it has raised $19 million in total funding between a recent seed and Series A round led by VC heavyweight Bessemer Venture Partners.
Like many small business management platforms, GlossGenius has a suite of services that handle everything from scheduling to payments to analytics, providing users with a holistic view of their business in one place. However, co-founder and CEO Danielle Cohen-Shohet says it goes a step beyond that, too.
“The real problem that GlossGenius is solving is not booking, for example, but actually really helping business owners succeed as entrepreneurs,” she told Built In. “We believe that anyone should be able to participate in small business entrepreneurship.”
Of course, the beauty and wellness industry was among the hardest hit during the pandemic, especially when local governments forced them to shutter their doors indefinitely. And Cohen-Shohet says GlossGenius stuck with them through all of it, shipping features that would have ordinarily taken them months in a matter of weeks or even days. The startup also helped facilitate more than $40 million in small business loan applications.
Now, salons and spas all over the country are rapidly digitizing, and there’s no sign of slowing down. GlossGenius says it has facilitated $1 billion in transaction volume in just five years of operation, and is on track to add more customers this year than it has in the last four years combined.
“I think the pandemic is one of those things that has, in many areas of our life, accelerated what would have normally been happening many years down the road,” Cohen-Shohet said. “I think the pandemic has opened many small business owners’ eyes, particularly in an industry like ours that’s been predominantly pen and paper. Their eyes have been opened to the promise of digitization.”
This shift is true of small and medium-sized businesses across all industries, not just beauty and wellness — indicated by the massive success of other similar fintech companies like new unicorn Melio; Mindbody, which just bought ClassPass; and Toast, which filed for an IPO a couple of months ago.
In fact, several key players in this space, including Toast execs Chris Comparato and Aman Narang, and Mindbody co-founder Robert Murphy, participated in GlossGenius’ recent raise. Cohen-Shohet says the startup will use this fresh funding to further innovate its product and grow its team “significantly” over the next year.
“We are on the cusp of one of the biggest changes in software monetization since the cloud,” she said. “The opportunities to serve small business owners and centralize much of what it is they’re doing, when you think about monetization opportunities, they’re quite large. And I’m excited about that.”
