appointment-booking
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The $750 Million Bet on Everything Around the Barber Chair
SQUIRE stopped trying to be OpenTable for haircuts and learned to run the whole shop. A decade later, its software sits between the calendar, the card reader, the barber, and the customer.
10x Dental
10x Dental is a Y Combinator (W25) startup that builds AI sales teams for dental practices. It plugs into a practice's patient database, finds overdue recalls, lapsed patients, and unscheduled treatment plans, then calls and texts those patients automatically to book them back into the chair - recovering revenue that would otherwise slip through the cracks.
StyleSeat
StyleSeat is an online marketplace and booking platform connecting beauty and wellness professionals - hair stylists, barbers, makeup artists, nail techs, estheticians - with millions of clients searching for appointments. Founded in San Francisco in 2011 by Melody McCloskey and Dan Levine, it bundles booking, payments, marketing, and a client database into a single tool for independent pros, while giving consumers a discovery and reservation engine for local services.
Fred Helou
Fred Helou is the founder and CEO of Vagaro, a cloud-based business management platform used by over 75,000 beauty, fitness, and wellness businesses across four countries. Born in Beirut in 1969, he escaped the Lebanese Civil War at 18, arrived in the United States penniless after being pickpocketed in France, and worked his way up from a $5-an-hour pickup boy to director of software development before being laid off in the 2008 recession — the catalyst that led him to build what is now a billion-dollar company. Vagaro has processed over $15 billion in payments, booked over 600 million appointments, and achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation following a 2021 reinvestment by FTV Capital.