Planity raises $48 million as a result of even hair salons want their very own SaaS product

In case you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you will have realized a French peculiarity. Even within the seemingly much less populated cities, there’s a hair salon.

French startup Planity has been profiting from France’s love affair with hair salons to launch a SaaS product for these companies specifically. Over time, the corporate expanded to different sorts of magnificence salons, comparable to barbers and nail salons.

And it has been working surprisingly properly as there at the moment are greater than 40,000 small companies counting on Planity for appointment reserving and extra. In actual fact, the startup lately raised a €45 million Sequence C spherical ($48 million at in the present day’s change price) in a spherical led by InfraVia Capital Companions with current traders Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Revaia and Bpifrance’s Digital Enterprise fund additionally collaborating.

Planity’s trajectory is an fascinating one on condition that it isn’t the primary massive European tech firm making an attempt to simplify magnificence salon appointment reserving. Specifically, Treatwell is already reside in a dozen European nations and had seemingly captured the digitization alternative of this extremely fragmented market.

Doctolib for magnificence salons

So what’s completely different with Planity? The startup’s co-founder and CEO Antoine Puymirat first began engaged on on-line appointment reserving in 2007. His first startup known as ClicRDV was a white-label on-line reserving resolution for all types of companies. It was acquired by Pages Jaune (now SoLocal).

After just a few years working for SoLocal, he left the corporate and went again to the drafting board with a extra targeted strategy. As an alternative of making an all-encompassing appointment resolution, he selected to concentrate on magnificence salons particularly.

Across the identical time, Doctolib was beginning to take off. The French startup, which is now a unicorn, has utterly modified appointment reserving for medical doctors and different health-related jobs. Its affect is even larger than that because it has profoundly modified how French folks cope with well being points.

Planity drew some inspiration from Doctolib. It’s a SaaS platform that utterly replaces the great outdated paper pocket book that was broadly utilized in hair salons. When folks name for an appointment, staff write down the appointment in Planity instantly. And, after all, folks also can e book appointments on-line by way of Planity’s app and web site. It turns into the one supply of fact and simplifies salon administration.

In contrast to Treatwell, Planity doesn’t cost a fee on every future sale. As an alternative, Planity is a standard SaaS product with a month-to-month subscription payment. The primary product at present prices €69 monthly. (With a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation, it signifies that Planity doubtless generates tens of tens of millions of euros in annual recurring income.)

“A lot of the current gamers have adopted a standard market mannequin just like the considered one of Reserving.com or TheFork,” Antoine Puymirat informed me. “Shoppers pay a share of the full quantity of every reservation. However we realized that this mannequin wasn’t working as some corporations have been round for 15 years, however they by no means actually reached a big scale in Europe.”

Based on him, the principle problem is that the majority prospects are returning prospects. And also you don’t wish to pay a fee each time they e book an appointment. With Planity, the extra your prospects use it to e book appointments on-line, the much less time you waste on the cellphone — and it doesn’t value you extra. That’s why magnificence salons encourage their prospects to make use of Planity.

“We go a bit additional than that. We additionally let our companies handle working hours. Staff can clock out and in within the morning and within the night. We deal with holidays. We will export payroll info,” Puymirat mentioned.

Each month, round eight million folks go to Planity. The platform handles round 10 million bookings monthly — 4 million of them are booked instantly by the top prospects on Planity. Different appointments are entered manually by staff when a buyer is speaking to them instantly.

The platform handles ready lists, ship reminders through textual content messages and creates a personalised schedule for every worker. Planity also can exchange the point-of-sales resolution for a further €20 monthly.

Some shoppers additionally get cost terminals from Planity. In that case, Planity makes use of Stripe’s APIs for the cost stack and takes a small lower on every transaction. However small retailers which can be already working with their financial institution for his or her cost terminals can preserve utilizing these terminals.

Up subsequent, the corporate plans to deal with wellbeing and health facilities. Planity’s fundamental market stays France — its house nation — however the firm is beginning to develop in Belgium and Germany.

Along with the fragmentation of the sweetness salon trade, there’s a barrier to entry to create a Planity competitor. The corporate has a big gross sales crew. They go and meet new shoppers to ensure that they perceive how the software program platform works.

This technique is each capital intensive and requires a strong gross sales playbook to work. There are at present round 200 gross sales folks working for Planity, and the corporate plans to rent much more.