Bookr secures new investment in a bridge financing round with support from Plus VC to enhance its services in the beauty sector
Today, Bookr, a premier cloud-based SaaS-enabled marketplace for finding and booking salons, spas, groomers, and stylists, announced a successful funding round from Plus VC, a prominent venture capital firm focusing on early-stage technology and technology-enabled startups in the MENA region and its diaspora. The amount raised in this bridge round was not disclosed.
Bookr serves as a comprehensive digital platform for both service providers and their clients, offering bilingual (English and Arabic) SaaS software. This platform facilitates the digitization of operations for business owners and customers alike, supporting salons in customer and lead acquisition, online payment processing for appointment security, retail revenue growth, and sales management. For consumers, it simplifies discovering deals, checking availability, making online reservations at local salons, and purchasing beauty products. The platform’s extensive functionality and wide-ranging solutions have played a critical role in Bookr’s fast-paced growth.
The capital from this round will be used to enhance Bookr’s proprietary technology, scale its marketing efforts, improve customer experience, grow its team, and expand its presence in the GCC. This fundraising comes on the heels of achieving several key milestones over the past year.
Zaina Al Bader, co-founder and CEO of Bookr, expressed pride in securing the funds from Plus VC, emphasizing the validation of their business model and Bookr’s distinctive positioning in the beauty industry. She looks forward to scaling the company’s capabilities, launching new products, and strengthening the network.
The bridge round’s success highlights the increasing demand for digital solutions in the beauty and wellness sectors. Since its inception, Bookr has transformed salon and spa operations, aligning with the digital era. With a vast untapped market of non-digitized salons, Bookr’s strategic growth plans are set for rapid expansion. As customers increasingly prefer convenient and efficient access to salon services, Bookr leads the digital transition, empowering salons to succeed in a changing environment.
Reflecting on 2023, Bookr celebrated a year of significant achievements and growth. To date, it has partnered with over 500 entities, facilitating more than 168,000 appointments worth over US$6.5 million across more than ten cities in the GCC. Top brands in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia have integrated Bookr into their SMS and POS systems.
Hasan Haider, Managing Partner at Plus VC, praised Bookr for its impressive growth and the team’s accomplishments. He recognized the product’s quality and Bookr’s status as a preferred platform in the industry, committing to support the team’s goals and market leadership in beauty and wellness.
Zaina also mentioned Bookr’s commitment to expanding its SaaS offerings and extending its services beyond the salon sector to include other appointment-based services.
The Bookr app offers a user-friendly interface for digitizing various activities, providing a dashboard in both Arabic and English to cater to all users. Available on Android and iOS, the app initially launched in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia in July 2018, followed by the introduction of an online beauty store in 2020. Since its launch, Bookr has seen organic growth each month without a marketing budget.
