Squire Technologies, a disruptive small business management platform for men’s grooming, has announced $8 million in Series A funding, bringing Squire’s total financing to $12.2 million.
People can book and pay for barbershop visits on their cellphone using Squire. The company’s scheduling and all-inclusive platform is used by barbers, barbershop owners and people who need haircuts in 28 cities and three countries.
The company grew 400 percent in 2018, and in the last two years Squire has accumulated 3 million-plus end users and processed more than $100 million in transactions, according to a press release.
Squire co-founders Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant noticed inefficiencies in barbershops and set out to solve the problem using the experience they gained working for other people in law and finance.
“Many shops would be using two or three different (kinds of) software to run their business,” LaRon said in a Moguldom interview. “They would use one thing for booking, one thing for point-of-sale payment, and something else for marketing and CRM. Technology is not their specialty, their specialty is cutting hair.”
The $8 million funding round was led by Silicon Valley VC firm Trinity Ventures with participation from new investor 645 Ventures and existing investors Richelieu Dennis’ New General Market Partners, Y Combinator, Bluefog Capital and Altair Capital.
The company’s previous $4.2 million seed round included Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, serial entrepreneur Paul Judge, Gmail creator Paul Bucheit, former Facebook executive and global VP of TikTok, Blake Chandlee, and 43North.
Squire is building an ecosystem for the barbershop industry with its own software, partnering with Instagram to incorporate booking a haircut into people’s profiles, and telling the stories of Squire’s barbershop customers on the content site, Ultra.
Both in their 30s and living in New York City, LaRon and Salvant had successful careers in law and finance before entering the entrepreneurial world. LaRon attended Yale Law School.
They made sure they understood the problem they were solving from the inside out. They opened a high-end Manhattan barbershop and ran it.
Appointment-based businesses are particularly complex for service providers and their customers, said Schwark Satyavolu, general partner at Trinity Ventures and member of Squire’s board of directors.
“The solutions for this particular SMB market out there today are a patchwork of disparate and ineffective solutions that solve one small part of a complex puzzle of problems,” Sattyavolu wrote in a Medium post. “This market desperately needs the kind of re-imagination that we’ve seen in transportation and retail.”
Nicky Prosseda owns Modern Male Barbershop with five locations in Pennsylvania. “Thanks to Squire’s focus on the unique needs of barbershop owners, I am able to make data-driven decisions to take my business to the next level,” Prosseda said in a prepared statement.
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Founded in 2015, Squire has offices in San Francisco, New York City and Buffalo, NY. Its software is used by independent professionals, standalone locations, and multi-location franchises, with tools such as point of sale, scheduling, payroll and CRM.
“Squire has done a phenomenal job of creating a delightful user experience for both small business owners and their customers. They are making payments disappear on both sides of a complex, multi-step transaction, and they are bringing innovative Silicon Valley technology to the SMB ecosystem,” Satyavolu said.
