Fresha raises $52.5M extension round
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Beauty & Wellness marketplace Fresha has successfully raised $52.5M in its latest funding round as an extension of its $100M Series C round raised earlier this year. The extension round was co-led by Michael Lahyani and BECO Capital, with previous backers General Atlantic, Partech, Target Global, and FMZ Ventures also participating. With this latest investment, Fresha would have raised $182M overall.
This extension brings Fresha’s total Series C raise to $152M, and along with this announcement initial investor MEVP also announced their second partial exit. MEVP’s new partial exit generated a 52x cash-on-cash multiple and an IRR of over 90%. Earlier this year MEVP announced it had made a partial exit from the company, generating a 39x cash-on-cash multiple. Following both exits, the Dubai-based venture capital firm continues to own a sizable stake in Fresha.
Launched by founders William Zeqiri and Nick Miller, Fresha allows consumers to discover, book and pay for beauty and wellness appointments with local businesses via its marketplace, while salons, spas, and barbershops can leverage Fresha to manage their operations with its intuitive, subscription-free business software. The Fresha platform removes the critical pain points that service-based businesses often encounter by seamlessly facilitating the acceptance of online appointment bookings, processing of card payments, and management of customer records, along with automation for marketing, staffing, product inventory, and accounting, all in one place.
2 months into the last quarter of the year, and the E-commerce industry has officially surpassed last year's deal count by 4 deals, raising twice the capital deployed YoY in 2021 YTD. Ranking as the 4th most funded sector in MENA despite aggregating the second-highest amount of transactions throughout the year, the E-commerce sector in MENA has delved into FinTech explorations and platform consolidation as the next big thing for digital platforms in the region. Of the largest rounds closed by MENA-based E-commerce startups this year many were closed by ventures adopting FinTech integrations or diversified product offerings including Duba-based Luxury Fashion marketplace The Luxury Closet, Saudi-based Try Now Buy Later platform Nejree Closet, UAE-based cosmetic treatment search and booking platform Selfologi, and Egypt-based b2b marketplace and supply chain solutions provider MaxAB.
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As the Beauty & Wellness marketplace connects local businesses and beauty operators amidst a pandemic that required many businesses to shut or halt working, Fresha grew its vision of the platform to create a comprehensive, all-encompassing marketplace for beauty & wellness products, services, and service providers as they stated in a conversation with Techcrunch. Today, Fresha’s tools include booking and point-of-sale payment software — used in some 120 countries with its biggest markets the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, where it sees tens of millions of appointments booked monthly and has processed $15 billion in transactions to date. Commenting on the bigger picture fueling this investment Co-founder/CEO William Zeqiri told Techcrunch “We want to build the Amazon of the beauty and wellness industry, with a full suite of services that compete at every level, and in all markets,” he said. That will include marketing, and marketing automation tools, and more down the line, he said. It will in the meantime face a pretty big army of competitors, from Square through to Booksy, Phorest, Treatwell, SalonIQ, and many others.”
Today, Fresha’s features include booking and point-of-sale payment software, but the startup will use its newly acquired funds to invest in building its new “Shopify” for beauty and wellness platform which is set for launch in the upcoming days. Aaron Goldman, global co-head of financial services and MD of General Atlantic concluded in a statement“Fresha has positioned itself as a major player in the beauty and wellness industry with a large and loyal customer base. We strongly believe in Fresha’s balanced strategy of providing one of the best products in the market at no cost to salons and then driving monetization via payments and value-added services.”
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