GlossGenius, a technology platform for the spa, studio, and salon industry, raised $16.4 million in a Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

WHO: Gloss Genius was founded in 2016 by Danielle Cohen-Shohet and Karim Butt as an all-in-one platform for beauty and wellness business owners to launch, operate, and maintain their businesses. The platform aims to be a "business in a box" solution for salon, spa, and studio owners through a suite of services that handle everyday tasks like scheduling, payments, client engagement, and analytics.

WHY: GlossGenius is focused more on growth and plans to use the infusion of capital to expand and create "unique product experiences that help take the burden off of running a business" to continue building its 100-person team.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS: "The early focus on bootstrapping helped us be maniacally focused on product-market fit and revenue generation and helped business have a strong start," co-founder and CEO Danielle Cohen-Shohet told TechCrunch. "For much of the time, the business was revenue-financed."

Kent Bennett, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said his firm was amazed to see the "true customer love" for the GlossGenius product.

GlossGenius is "one of the few efficient hyper-growth companies that is succeeding through organic adoption among small businesses. Unlike other solutions that tend to focus on business managers with a top-down approach, GlossGenius focuses first on serving the needs of service professionals that are running their businesses, helping them deliver the best possible client service in a convenient, mobile-first platform. This superior functionality leads to bottom-up driven success for businesses of any size in the beauty and wellness industry," Bennett said to TechCrunch.

DETAILS:

• GlossGenius raised $16.4 million in a Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation by Tobias Lütke (co-founder & CEO of Shopify), Chris Comparato (CEO of Toast), Aman Narang (co-founder of Toast), Robert Murphy (co-founder of Mindbody), Yelp execs, and other fintech execs.
• GlossGenius surpassed $1 billion in gross merchandise volume and transitioned into payments as a fintech hardware provider with the development of a card reader that integrates with its app.
• The business raised $2.8 million in pre-seed and seed funding from angels and Techstars bootstrapping for five years before raising more outside capital.
• The business has raised a total of $19 million to date in seed and Series A rounds.