Danielle
Cohen-Shohet

Danielle Cohen-Shohet runs GlossGenius, the software that quietly powers the appointment you booked, the deposit you paid, and the reminder text you ignored at your favorite salon.

It is the unglamorous machinery behind a glamorous business: scheduling, payments, point-of-sale, marketing, client records, and now embedded lending and AI - bundled into one app aimed squarely at independent hairstylists, nail techs, estheticians and spa owners. The pitch is simple. A beauty professional should spend the day on the craft, not on the spreadsheet.

Under her watch the company has grown past 65,000 businesses and crossed roughly $100 million in revenue, reaching a $510 million valuation on its 2023 Series C. That is a large number for a category most venture investors spent years walking past. She did not.

What makes her unusual is not the title. It is the resume underneath it. Summa cum laude at Princeton. Analyst at Goldman Sachs. And then, instead of hiring engineers to build her idea, she taught herself full-stack mobile and web development and wrote the first version of GlossGenius by hand.

She is a founder who came up through finance, fell in love with design, and ended up obsessed with a corner of the economy that is mostly run by women, mostly run by hand, and mostly underserved by software. The result is a company that treats a one-chair nail studio with the same seriousness most platforms reserve for enterprise accounts.

She still calls GlossGenius her single greatest tech obsession. Coming from someone who builds technology for a living, that is either a confession or a strategy. With her, it is both.

There is a tell in how she talks about the work. She does not describe salons as a market segment. She describes them as people she once stood beside, doing the same job, fighting the same small fires - a client who reschedules twice, a payment that takes three days to clear, a marketing email nobody opens. The product is an argument that those small fires deserve good engineering. Most of the industry decided they did not. She built a company on the opposite premise.

At Princeton she ran a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. It paid, but the operations were a mess - booking clients, chasing payments, remembering who liked what. Most people would shrug and move on. She kept asking why nobody had built the obvious tool.

The asking turned into building. She took coding classes. With her twin sister Leah she tried a digital-receipts venture, an early hint at the payments thread that runs through everything she has done since.

Then came the practical detour: Goldman Sachs. A couple of years in finance gave her the payments fluency that beauty software was missing. She left anyway.

Her co-founder, Karim Butt, came from an unexpected place - freelance DJing. Different industry, identical headache: how do independent professionals book, get paid, and keep clients coming back without an army of staff? Both could write code, so they did.

The first version was rough. Beauty pros used it anyway, which told her everything. The pain was real, the bar was low, and nobody respectable was competing for it. She has been widening that gap ever since.

The throughline is consistent: a maker who understands the customer because she was the customer, holding a card reader in one hand and a makeup brush in the other.

Cohen-Shohet describes herself as someone who has always had a passion for design and art, and it shows in a category that historically did not care about either. A lot of small-business software looks like it was built to be tolerated. Hers is built to be enjoyed - clean interfaces, hardware that a stylist would actually want sitting on the front desk, the kind of polish that signals respect for the person using it.

That instinct is not decoration. In a business where the owner is also the receptionist, the marketer and the accountant, friction is the enemy. Every confusing screen is a minute stolen from the chair. Design, in her hands, is an operations decision dressed up as an aesthetic one.

Then there is the finance side. The Goldman years were not a detour she regrets - they were the part of the resume that let her see GlossGenius not as a booking app but as a payments company. The bookings are the wedge. The money moving through the platform is the business. That framing is why investors who once ignored beauty eventually wrote the checks.

She is candid that the first version was bad. She treats that as a feature of the story, not a footnote to hide. Failure, in her telling, is just a step in the learning process - a posture that is easy to put on a slide and hard to actually live when the early product is held together with hope. Beauty pros adopted it anyway, and that early, ugly traction taught her to trust the customer over the critic.

The other constant is her resistance to coasting. She has talked about waking each day with a sense of urgency, an unwillingness to let the company settle into comfortable. For a business that has crossed $100 million in revenue, that restlessness is the difference between a category leader and a company that got comfortable one round too early.

And she keeps the work close. The decision to learn engineering rather than outsource it was not a one-time stunt; it set the tone for a founder who would rather understand a problem in her hands than admire it from a distance.