Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer
Leah Cohen-Shohet
She could have spent a career underwriting other people's startups. Instead she bet on nail techs, colorists, and the woman renting a single chair.
She could have spent a career underwriting other people's startups. Instead she bet on nail techs, colorists, and the woman renting a single chair.
Walk into a one-chair nail studio in Queens or a three-room spa in Phoenix and there is a decent chance the software ringing up the client, booking next month, sending the reminder text, and quietly offering a loan was shaped by Leah Cohen-Shohet. As Chief Business Officer and co-founder of GlossGenius, she runs the commercial engine of a company that decided beauty professionals deserved the same caliber of software that Wall Street trading desks take for granted.
That is the unlikely part. Cohen-Shohet did not arrive here from a salon. She arrived from Goldman Sachs, where she sat in the Principal Strategic Investments group sizing up fintech and enterprise-software bets. She arrived from Symphony, the enterprise collaboration platform valued at $1.4 billion, where she rose to EVP of Growth and Adoption. She arrived from Archipelago, helping launch a risk-data platform for the insurance world. Her resume reads like a tour of the least glamorous, highest-margin corners of software. Then she pointed all of it at hairstylists.
The throughline is not beauty. It is the conviction that the most underserved customers make the most durable companies. GlossGenius is built on the premise that an independent beauty entrepreneur, working alone, running on cash and a paper appointment book, is exactly as serious a business owner as anyone with a corner office, and has been handed exactly none of the tools. Cohen-Shohet's job is to close that gap and make money doing it.
Stay focused on the longer term, despite the daily challenges.
The company everyone now values north of half a billion dollars began as a college side hustle. At Princeton, Leah's identical twin sister Danielle ran freelance makeup artistry out of her dorm room. The two of them, both economics-minded and both restless, also tinkered with a venture around digital receipts and payments. The makeup work and the payments curiosity were not separate hobbies. They were the two halves of the same observation: the people doing beautiful, skilled, in-demand work had no infrastructure underneath them.
Danielle taught herself to code, left a finance job, and founded GlossGenius in 2015 to solve the problem she had lived firsthand - the booking chaos, the no-shows, the impossible math of growing a client base with no system. Leah was the thought partner from day one. While Danielle built product and engineering, Leah went and got the operator's education that the company would later need, scaling growth at Symphony and learning go-to-market at Archipelago.
The sisters grew up in Florida, raised by parents who, as Leah has described it, encouraged them to think big and to be excellent at everything they touched. There was also hardship - their father received a serious diagnosis during their freshman year - a moment that the twins have credited with sharpening their resilience and their sense of urgency. They describe themselves, plainly, as really competitive people.
Booking, payments, point of sale, marketing, client management, forms and waivers, instant payouts, and financing - one platform for the beauty and wellness professional. Newer additions include GeniusAI, which writes personalized email campaigns, and Genius Loans, fast capital for businesses that traditional lenders ignore.
In late 2020, GlossGenius did something that surprises people: it turned on the venture-capital path only after it had already built positive unit economics. The company bootstrapped its way to discipline first, then raised money to pour gasoline on something that already worked. That sequencing - profitable instincts before outside capital - is a Cohen-Shohet signature, and it shows up in how the business has been run since.
The funding followed. Bessemer Venture Partners, Techstars, and others backed the company across rounds that now total roughly $134 million, pushing the valuation past a reported $510 million. The platform serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses. But the numbers are downstream of the thesis. Cohen-Shohet's wager is that vertical software - tools built for one industry rather than sold to everyone - wins when the industry has been ignored long enough and the founders understand it in their bones.
Her recognition has tracked the bet. In 2019, Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 list in Finance. She has served as a board member at FINOS, advancing open-source collaboration across financial services, and co-founded an academic prep venture, Princeton Academic Prep, back in her student days. The pattern is consistent: find the place where good tools are missing, then build the infrastructure and the business model at the same time.
Be fearless. Don't take no for an answer. And, importantly, surround yourself with like-minded people.
Most co-founder stories are about two strangers who learned to trust each other. This one is about two people who have known each other since before birth. Danielle is CEO, leading product and engineering. Leah is CBO, running the commercial side. The division of labor is clean, and the shorthand between them is older than the company, older than Princeton, older than every term sheet they have ever signed.
That closeness is the quiet asset. In a startup, the most expensive thing is misalignment at the top - two founders pulling in different directions while the team guesses which one to follow. The Cohen-Shohets removed that variable. Leah has been called Danielle's strongest collaborator, the thought partner who was there before there was anything to partner on. The aspiration they share is bigger than booking software: they want GlossGenius to be a gateway for entrepreneurship, the place where anyone can start, run, and grow a business with the software, payments, and support behind them.
It is a tidy reversal of how these things usually go. The glamorous degree, the Goldman job, the enterprise-software pedigree - all of it could have pointed Leah Cohen-Shohet toward the obvious, prestigious version of a career. She spent it instead making sure the person who does your hair gets paid on time, gets booked solid, and gets a shot at building something of her own.
"The most underserved customers make the most durable companies - and beauty professionals had been handed almost no tools at all."