Miami — Do you do your nails regularly, or go to the same salon again and again to get a haircut? If so, you probably call or send a WhatsApp message to make an appointment. It’s a lot of back and forth for something that could be done with a click of a button. That’s what AgendaPro is here to offer. Today, the company that dubs itself as “Shopify for beauty and wellness,” announced the close of a $3.7M funding round led by Kayyak Ventures, with participation from FEN Ventures, TMT Investimentos, Y Combinator, James Park (CEO of Fitbit), SCM Advisors, and Cathexis Ventures.
AgendaPro offers booking and payment processing for independent businesses in the beauty and wellness industry. By using a service like AgendaPro, these small business owners can cut their costs by doing away with an assistant that usually handles all the booking and payments. It also makes it easy for someone who is an independent practitioner to be a one man show.
In the U.S. we see companies like MindBody, which offers a virtually identical product, leading the space. At its last valuation, MindBody was valued at $1.9 billion. It’s no surprise then that AgendaPro caught the eyes of Y Combinator in terms of market potential, especially since the beauty and wellness market in Latin America is huge. AgendaPro participated in YC’s Winter 21 batch.
AgendaPro is originally from Chile, but now operates in 17 markets in Latin America including Chile, Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina. The company was founded by Julio Guzmán, Matias Ulloa, Sebastian Hevia, and Nicolás Rossi.
While the company was founded in 2013 and launched in 2014, the team pivoted in 2020 to today’s current model.
“At first, when we started AgendaPro, we were trying to disrupt Groupon in the services industry. In the process we realized that these service providers didn’t have an appointments software,” said Guzmán, the company’s CEO and co-founder.
The company last reported $1.8 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) and 89% gross margins (March 2021) which even then was pretty good for a software company. They also shared their YOY (year over year) growth with us for the last three years.
2019 was a breakout year because the pandemic hadn’t hit yet. That year the company experienced 116% growth.
“I was in Mexico in 2020 when Covid hit the world and our appointments hit 11.9%. It was like we were meant to disappear,” said Guzmán. That year they still saw 38% growth, and in 2021 the company grew 47%.
AgendaPro currently has 103 employees, and more than 3,700 merchants on board, and while they don’t offer POS (point of sales) just yet, they plan to offer it soon starting with Mexico.
The company will use the funding from this round to roll out the POS. In the next few months, they’ll be moving their headquarters to Mexico and are following the successful playbook of other vertical SaaS companies that have come before them:
“We’re exploring the possibility of being a financial products company for these merchants. Payroll, credit cards, for example only 30% of these merchants have a credit card, so imagine the barber in the barber shop, he definitely doesn’t have a credit card,” Guzmán said.
