Investing in Planity, the SaaS enabled marketplace for the beauty sector
We are incredibly excited to announce our new partnership with Antoine Puymirat, Jérémy Queroy, Paul Vonderscher and the rest of the team at Planity, the leading end-to-end SaaS platform for beauty salons. We are thrilled to lead its €30m Series B alongside existing investors Alven, Bpifrance, Crédit Mutuel Innovation and Eiffel Investment Group.
Like many industries largely made up of small businesses, adoption of technologies has lagged. In Europe, hair and beauty is a huge €100bn-plus industry but one that was historically run offline with paper diaries and phone calls. The availability of online booking in the beauty sector remains extremely low versus what you can find in other industries. Today only 13% of beauty salons have an online booking solution — Planity expects this market to be over 60% equipped within 5 years.
Just like health with Doctolib or hospitality with Booking.com, we believe this is a winner-takes-all market. Thanks to Antoine’s successful experience in the online booking space (having founded ClicRDV which was then acquired by Solocal), Planity is deploying a well-structured playbook to turn the company into the European champion of the beauty software market.
Planity leads with a suite of offerings allowing consumers to discover, book and pay for beauty and wellness appointments via its marketplace, while salons can leverage Planity to manage their operations via its end-to-end SaaS solution. The Planity platform seamlessly facilitates the acceptance of online appointment bookings, processing of card payments and management of customer records, along with a comprehensive loyalty system, inventory control and cash management, all in one place.
Planity’s focus on building easy-to-use subscription software, underpinned by a strong word-of-mouth effect, has helped the company build a loyal following and customer base in France. Planity’s partner businesses rely on the platform for its ease of use, its time-saving benefits and embedded features to grow sales, while end-consumers enjoy a premium booking and payment experience. Looking beyond 2021, the team has significant aspirations to leverage its leadership position in France to conquer new markets, starting with Germany, and to expand to adjacent verticals.
We at Gaia Capital Partners are big advocates of vertical SaaS solutions which are leveraging the power of tailored products, with exhaustive feature sets that enable high-value outcomes and clear ROI. We believe Antoine’s, Jérémy’s and Paul’s nuanced grasp of the market, their relentless grit to get the product right and their unwavering focus on their customers will propel them to see outsized success in this vertical.
As investors, we also feel we have a responsibility to make sure technology is not simply helping the happy few. We are proud to back a solution that provides modern tools to people who have been neglected by technology over the last decade. We are excited to support the founders and the entire team, who are powering a thriving ecosystem of salons and doing more than cutting hair — they are entrepreneurs, artists and community builders. We look forward to partnering with Antoine, Jérémy, Paul and the team at Planity and to building upon their success!
Jean-David Herld
