Key Takeaways:
Bohemian Salon, an independently owned salon in the greater Manchester area, offered hair coloring services that followed a fairly traditional approach for most of the company’s 15-year history. Stylists would mix and measure color from tubes sold by major brands like L’Oréal and Redken. Hundreds of tubes would pile up in the hair color dispensary, the station where stylists mix color to dye hair.
“It can be messy,” said Katie Ogden, the owner of the UK-based salon that sits just outside the city of Manchester, in an interview with BeautyMatter. “No matter how organized you are with your stock, there’s always a color that will slip through the net.” Mixing the wrong colors can result in wasteful expenses for salon owners like Ogden.
With nearly 40% of the salon’s revenue coming from hair coloring services, Ogden decided to embrace a new approach. She installed three hair coloring devices made by Yuv, which makes a cartridge-based hair color system that’s designed for hair salons like Bohemian and for freelance professionals.
Today, all members of Ogden’s staff use only Yuv’s hair coloring system, called the Yuv Lab. The device not only cuts down on waste and is more economical because Bohemian Salon only pays for the color it uses by the gram, on top of a small leasing fee for the device, but stylists can also use Yuv Lab while standing right next to their clients.
“It’s more human, weirdly, because you don’t have to keep disappearing and running off somewhere,” said Ogden. “You don’t have to leave the client.”
Launched in 2023 in the UK market, Yuv has the wind behind its sails as the London-based startup plots an expansion into the United States in 2026. In December 2025, the company raised $12 million in a Series A to support the expansion across the pond and for working capital. Less than two months before that, Yuv broke a record for the most money offered and the highest valuation in Dragon Den’s 22-season history.
Yuv founder and CEO Francisco Gimenez told BeautyMatter that the company has already installed more than 300 devices in the UK market and has interest from more than 2,000 salons.
“There are so many problems with the way that traditional hair coloring works at the salon,” Gimenez told BeautyMatter. He said the top issues include salons spending money on tubes of color that aren’t always completely used, wasteful packaging, too many redundant SKUs from the legacy players who use similar ingredients in their formulations, and salons not always effectively managing the right level of stock for all the shades they need.
Yuv aims to solve many of those problems. The company’s refillable hair coloring system claims to eliminate waste by 35%, a figure that the startup calculated through its controlled dispensing system that eliminates the need to open multiple tubes, while also reducing variance from manual mixing, color oxidation, and untracked product losses.
Hair salons and freelance stylists are charged via a pay-per-gram system, on top of a hardware leasing fee of about £44 ($66) each month. An iPad is used to record and track past mixes and to create formulations. A predictive AI algorithm can autonomously manage when cartridges need to be restocked.
“The algorithms that we created are the ones that help us figure out how much to send based on the frequency of usage,” said Gimenez. “The salon owner doesn’t even have to worry about placing the order.”
By expanding into the US, Yuv can tackle a $60 billion hair salon industry that has risen by a compound annual growth rate of 5% over the past five years, according to market researcher IBISWorld. Hair coloring services account for nearly 28% of a typical US hair salon’s revenue, or $16.7 billion in annual sales.
“The US becomes such a natural new market, where Francisco knows a lot of Tier 1 salons and hairdressers,” said Eric Sävendahl, principal at Nineyards Equity. The Stockholm-based venture capital firm led Yuv’s latest Series A. “In venture, if you win in the US, you generally win globally,” added Sävendahl.
He said that Nineyards Equity prioritizes investments in startups like Yuv that have an established base of customers and are looking to their next phase of growth, either by expanding into new geographies or expanding their product portfolio. “We actually like having a hardware component,” said Sävendahl, which he said is a differentiation from the trend of most technology VC funding flowing to AI and software startups.
Sävendahl said his firm was encouraged by Yuv’s recurring revenue model from the ongoing sale of color cartridges, the high margins for hair coloring, and a big global market; his research shows that the professional hair coloring market is worth $55 billion globally. And this figure only accounts for demand at salons. With at-home hair coloring, sales are far higher.
Gimenez was also viewed as a desirable founder to invest in. His prior venture, the custom hair color business eSalon.com, was sold to German industrial and consumer chemicals manufacturer Henkel in 2019. eSalon generated around $30 million in annual sales for its final year as a stand-alone business, primarily in the US market.
“He’s a very inspirational founder with a great vision for what he wants to do with Yuv and how he wants to transform and improve how hairdressers work,” said Sävendahl.
Gimenez, who began his career in financial services in Mexico City, has now spent 18 years focused on launching two different technology startups within the beauty space, a sector he says is alluring because it helps people feel better. Yuv’s technology takes some inspiration from the printer and its refillable cartridges, a system that most now take for granted.
“This concept is kind of applying a concept that exists out there into something that makes sense for the beauty industry,” said Gimenez.
He added that Yuv’s technology could be especially beneficial for freelance stylists, who are busy serving as their own hairdressers, managers, and bookkeepers. “This is a way of having your own assistant,” said Gimenez. “And it’s not expensive.”