Miami — Today Encuadrado, a Chile-based booking and payments tool for professional service providers, announced the close of their $1.5 million Seed round after graduating from Y Combinator’s Summer 21 batch just a few months ago. The round includes participation from Pioneer Fund, Prodigio Capital, and Xtripe Angels, among other angel investors. The company has raised a total of $1.625 million to date.
“Managing a business as a solo practitioner requires setting up a system of separate tools to get booked, paid, and invoice. This setup is confusing, time-consuming, and creates a complex fractured experience for the providers as well as their clients. As an all-in-one solution, we enable self-employed service professionals to focus on providing the best service to their customers,” Thomas Maremaa, co-founder and CEO of Encuadrado.
The company, which launched in September 2019 and expanded to Mexico in September 2021, makes it possible for individual solo practitioners such as a hairdresser or personal trainer, to offer bookings and payments online, which makes having an assistant unnecessary.
Tomás Aguilera’s [the co-founder and CTO] mom is a dentist, and she runs her own shop, and she would send emails to remind people about getting their teeth cleaned, and they would reply back asking for the same appointment dates,” said Maremaa.
By emailing or texting your clients with a link to a booking website where they can pay as well, Encuadrado is streamlining the booking process for solo practitioners.
27.2% of the Chilean workforce is self-employed, the company said in a statement, yet most people are still using WhatsApp or instagram to manage their bookings, not to mention phone calls.
While the company only accepts payments online at the moment, they do plan to have POS (point of sales) systems in the future. “Square is our North star,” said Maremaa. Square is a public American company that offers payment and booking solutions similar to that of Encuadrado.
Since launch, Encuadrado has on boarded more than 1000 sellers and they charge about a $40/month subscription fee for their service. “If you compare it to hiring an assistant, that’s going to be about $800/month, so it’s 20 times cheaper,” said Aguilera.
The Backstory
Aguilera and Maremaa are long time friends and wanted to start a business together, but they didn’t know in what industry. One day over lunch, Aguilera brought up the booking and payments pain point in his mother’s business as a dentist, and the two decided that there was a business to be built there.
“People are becoming much more independent; fixed costs [to run a business] have gone down, but infrastructure still hasn’t changed,” said Maremaa.
Once you have a rolodex of sellers on board, it would seem logical to open up Encuadrado as a marketplace for services, but the co-founders have decided to stick to offering payment services to sellers alone. “It’s not out of the cards for the future,” Maremaa said. “We had this conversation early on, and we decided not to do a marketplace, because people didn’t need more patients, but they needed a way to run their business.”
