Shedul founder and CEO William Zeqiri and co-founder and chief product officer Nick Miller
Shedul, a London-based beauty booking platform for salons and spas, announced it has raised $20 million in Series B funding at a $105 million valuation. This round of funding was led by Partech. Berlin-based Target Global, Dubai-based BECO Capital, and New York-based FJ Labs also participated in this round. And the round also included investments from Delivery Hero founder and CEO Niklas Östberg.
This funding round was oversubscribed with additional secondary transactions of $3 million. Dubai-based MEVP invested in Shedul’s seed round in 2016 as one of the early investors and the firm is selling a part of its stake in the company at 17x returns. This Series B round brings the total amount raised by Shedul to $32 million to date.
Shedul’s free SaaS-enabled marketplace enables salons and spas around the world to streamline business operations. And in just a few years since launching, the company has rapidly built a vast customer base of merchants in over 120 countries primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.
Founded by CEO William Zeqiri and chief product officer Nick Miller, Shedul also recently launched a consumer marketplace called Fresha.com, which connects merchants using free business software to consumers online. And the marketplace unlocks revenue potential for merchants by leveraging the power of online bookings and automated marketing through mobile apps and integrations to Instagram, Facebook, and Google.
“Being customer-driven is ingrained into our team’s core,” said Zeqiri. “Since day one, we have focused on solving major challenges to make our customers happy. We spend much time talking to our customers and acting on their feedback, enhancing our platform to suit their needs. That’s how we’ve built an award-winning product that can sell itself.”
Shedul announced it is now hitting 8 million booked appointments on the platform every month at a value of more than $270 million and higher. And growth in active merchants is expanding at an average rate of 20% quarter-on-quarter — which makes Shedul the world’s fastest growing beauty and wellness platform. By the end of 2019, Shedul is on track to process $6 billion worth of appointment bookings.
“It’s not only the quality of our product which gives an advantage. It’s the unbeatable accessibility our platform offers customers,” added Miller. “The market is highly competitive, crowded with legacy software providers who charge excessive fees to simply access their products. We’ve re-invented the business model by offering our business software totally free of charge, and instead, monetize online bookings made through our marketplace. This strategy helps us consolidate the industry, building up a vast global network of merchants for our marketplace. We solved the chicken and egg problem of reaching marketplace liquidity, letting us rapidly scale and monetize the network.”
With this funding round, Shedul is planning to accelerate product development and support the ongoing worldwide rollout of Fresha.com.
“We believe the founders have built an excellent product and demonstrated impressive growth since inception with their unique business model,” explained Partech co-managing partner Philippe Collombel. “They have a winning vision to deliver transformational change to the beauty and wellness industry, and we believe their strategy will propel them to become the largest booking platform for the multi-trillion dollar beauty market.”
