New Delhi: Salon-focused SaaS platform Glamplus has raised Rs 2 crore in a Pre-Series A led by Inflection Point Ventures, one of India’s leading angel investment platforms in India. A few of the other investors in this round are Anil G (Co-Founder & COO at Bounce) Sachin Khandelwal (MD & CEO at Sadhan Enterprise), Sravan Kumar (CEO at Transin), Abhishek Daiya (AVP at Byju’s), and Anudeep Nagalia (VP at Shadowfax). They have invested in a personal capacity.
Funds raised will be used for the enhancement of product & tech capabilities and business expansion. The funds will also be utilized in scaling to 3000 partners in the next 6 months along with the vertical expansion of the business line.
With an absence of SaaS based system for Salons, the management of customers has been mostly offline. To help them bring their database and analytics online, Glamplus was launched in 2020. It offers an experience-based CRM solution for repeat engagement. With this platform, the salons (and other partners like Gyms and Spas) can manage their customers’ appointment, staff management and their suppliers through a simple dashboard. The platform also helps them with analytical reports to understand the needs of the customers, their visits patterns, and other insights which can help businesses to elevate the customer experience.
Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, Inflection Point Venture says, “Salons, spas, and gyms form one of the largest portions of our discretionary spends. However, on the other side, salons run in a highly informal manner which gives them little insights about their customers, their spending patterns, and the frequency of their visits. Glamplus has identified this opportunity and it has the potential to help salons and gyms to move from informal to a formal economy and grow their business in the process.”
Glamplus aims to digitize the informal economy of salons, gyms, and spas through an asset-light model and vertical integration like beauty products, hiring, and easy loans. This is done to create one collective ecosystem to improve customer experience. With the help of the portal, partners can discover information about customers for upsell and better retention. This is a step towards organizing the informal economy by standardizing the processes.
Divyanshu Singh, Co-Founder, Glamplus says, “When we reached out to IPV, with such rich experience in beauty and wellness segment, they were convinced on the market upside potential and how this segment with evolve further with deep tech SaaS. IPV not just identifies the market sizing with respect to the salon partner ecosystem but also sees an opportunity to uplift the skill sets of semi-skilled economy. In the last 3 months, we have seen traction of more than 500 partners joining Glamplus platform and higher platform adoption gives a belief to go deeper in tier 1 and tier2 cities also.”
The startup has scaled to 500 paying partners in less than 3 months across 3 cities- Bengaluru, Delhi, and Pune. Glamplus has a strong core team, developed with a collective startup experience of 15 years across unicorns like OLA, Bounce, Ninjacart, PagarBook, BlackBuck and Quotient Technology. Founders understand the nerve of SMB salon/spa market really well which helped them in developing the product as per core needs of SMB market and thus creating immense stickiness for partners to engage on a regular basis.
Salon Industry is comprised of $200bn market with 15% y-o-y growth and there is a huge potential to completely digitize this offline SMB economy. With more than 5.5 million Salons in the country and over 10 million Salons in SE Asia, the market size is only growing. Penetration of smartphones, post Jio boom in tier 1 and tier 2 cities is resulting in SMBs quickly adopting technology. Glamplus aims to tap 30% of this market potential in the next 2-3 years with higher engagement offerings and enhanced tech product capabilities.
