salon-software
(6)
Vagaro
Vagaro is a Pleasanton, California SaaS company that runs the back office for salons, spas, fitness studios, and wellness businesses. From a single dashboard, owners book appointments, take payments, manage staff and inventory, run marketing, and get discovered on a consumer marketplace and app. Founded in 2009 by Fred Helou, it now serves more than 83,000 businesses across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, reached a $1 billion valuation in 2021, and bundles scheduling, point-of-sale hardware, embedded payments, and AI tools into one subscription.
GlossGenius
GlossGenius is a New York-based vertical SaaS and fintech platform that gives independent beauty and wellness professionals - hair stylists, nail techs, estheticians, spas and medspas - one app to run the whole business. It combines online booking, a built-in card-processing POS, client CRM, marketing automation, payroll, inventory and AI agents, replacing the patchwork of spreadsheets, paper books and generic tools that solo operators and small salons relied on. Founded in 2016 by Danielle Cohen-Shohet, it crossed roughly $100M in revenue, serves tens of thousands of businesses, and reached unicorn status with a reported $1.12B valuation after its January 2026 Series D.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and co-founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and point-of-sale platform built for salons, spas and independent beauty professionals. A summa cum laude Princeton graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, she taught herself to code and wrote the first version of the product after running a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. Founded with co-founder Karim Butt and run alongside her twin sister Leah, GlossGenius now serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses, crossed roughly $100M in revenue, and reached a $510M valuation on its 2023 Series C.
Leah Cohen-Shohet
Leah Cohen-Shohet is co-founder and Chief Business Officer of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments, and point-of-sale platform built for beauty and wellness professionals. A Princeton economics graduate and former Goldman Sachs strategic investor, she left a fintech career at Symphony and Archipelago to scale the company her twin sister Danielle founded out of a Princeton dorm-room makeup side hustle. Under their partnership GlossGenius has grown to serve tens of thousands of independent beauty businesses, reached a valuation north of half a billion dollars, and raised roughly $134 million in total funding.
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.