The beauty industry has seen an explosion of offerings recently. Customers can now access treatments far beyond basic hair and nail care, from wrinkle-smoothing Botox and fillers to permanent laser hair removal to weight management through GLP-1 medications.
Riding this wave of industry growth is Boulevard, a provider of scheduling and payment software for the self-care sector.
The 9-year-old Boulevard just raised $80 million in Series D funding, valuing the business at nearly $800 million, a meaningful uptick from the $595 million valuation it garnered three years ago. The round was led by growth equity firm JMI Equity and included participation from existing investors Index Ventures and VMG Partners.
When Boulevard launched in 2016, the company’s co-founders, Matt Danna and Sean Stavropoulos, wanted to solve what seemed like a simple problem: allowing people to book hairstyling visits online.
The duo couldn’t understand why salons still made clients call to make appointments. What they discovered was that salons were intentionally resistant to online scheduling: They were trying to optimize stylists’ time.
So, Boulevard built a machine learning-based booking system that considers various constraints, such as clients’ unique service needs and punctuality history.
The company initially sold their precision-scheduling software to hair salons, expanding to barbershops, spas, and nail salons.
Boulevard’s revenue soared over 500% in the last three years, partly driven by a burgeoning new client segment: medspas. These businesses, which are a hybrid between traditional day spas and medical clinics, provide nonsurgical, minimally invasive procedures ranging from microneedling and Botox to prescribing GLP-1 medications like Ozempic for weight loss.
Danna, who serves as Boulevard’s CEO, said he was first surprised that medspa owners were interested in using the company’s software instead of electronic medical records systems (EMRs). He discovered that EMRs are better suited for clients billing insurance, whereas medspas predominantly run on a cash-pay model.
Adapting Boulevard’s software to serve medspas was pretty straightforward, Danna said. The company became HIPAA compliant and integrated medspa-specific features, including visual charts for precise Botox and filler injection mapping.
Three years after introducing these features, Boulevard estimates that it is powering approximately 15% of all medspas in the U.S.
“I am really impressed by how beauty and medical services lines are blurring,” Danna said. “We have hair salons that offer medspa services.”
Over the years, Boulevard expanded its offerings to include an online payment system, a business offering that the company unexpectedly stumbled upon. “We ended up learning that if you make it easy to book online, it is easy to not show up for an appointment,” Danna said. “So, we started capturing credit cards to hold appointments, and that solved the problem of no-shows.”
Though Boulevard initially had no intention of charging those credit cards, customers requested the company use the data for transactions. Boulevard now estimates it will process approximately $5 billion in payments this year.
Of course, Boulevard has plenty of competition, including Zenoti, which was last valued at $1 billion in 2020, Fresha, Booksy, and many others.