HoneyBook offers a platform that helps independent business owners organize workflow, manage client lists, and handle cash flow with embedded payments and a recently launched capital product that integrates repayment into transactions. The company has expanded its financial-services offerings, including payments and a capital product that gives eligible members access to funds for growth. HoneyBook has more than doubled its annual recurring revenue since the beginning of 2021 and more than doubled new subscribers in the past 12 months. Members booked over $1.8 billion on the platform in 2021, with total bookings exceeding $5 billion since the company launched in 2013. Going forward, HoneyBook plans to develop additional financial services, accelerate feature rollouts, and hire across the U.S. and Israel to support its growth. HoneyBook provides a unified SaaS platform combining billing, contracts, client communication and other tools aimed at service-based SMBs and freelancers such as designers, event planners, marketers and photographers. Since its 2013 founding the company says members have booked more than $3 billion on the platform, and members booked over $1 billion in the past nine months. Over the past 12 months HoneyBook doubled its number of members and tripled its annual recurring revenue. During the COVID-19 downturn the company avoided layoffs by instituting temporary pay cuts and later reinstated salaries as demand rebounded. HoneyBook operates teams in San Francisco and Tel Aviv and currently has a 103-person headcount. The company plans to use new capital for continued product development, to expand its team, build financial products and make the platform more customizable for verticals. HoneyBook provides a customer-relationship management platform tailored to creative businesses, freelancers, and solopreneurs, offering tools to develop client relationships, manage projects, send invoices, and accept payments. The platform differentiates by enabling users to accept online payments without third-party integrations, which the company says drives users to transact more than 80% of their business online. HoneyBook also operates Rising Tide, an online community with about 75,000 members. The company claims tens of thousands of customers and reports over $1 billion in business booked through its software. HoneyBook plans to use new funding to grow teams in San Francisco and Tel Aviv and to build additional product features for its user base. Its partnership with Citi is intended to allow development of new financial products for freelancers and small businesses. HoneyBook is presented as a market network focused on the events industry, combining social/network profiles with a marketplace and embedded SaaS workflow. Event professionals build a profile that serves as their professional home, use HoneyBook to send self-branded proposals, sign contracts digitally, and connect collaborators such as florists and photographers around projects. The platform supports many-to-many, N-sided transactions where collaborators can team up, exchange proposals, and get paid through the system. HoneyBook is described as digitizing offline professional workflows that historically relied on fax, checks and phone calls, increasing transaction velocity, close rates, and customer satisfaction. The article notes HoneyBook as a 35-person company in San Francisco and casts it as a prime example of the market-network model that could scale across complex service industries. It also frames HoneyBook’s product as part of a broader trend expected to change how independent professionals operate and how customers buy services. HoneyBook operates an invite-only experience planning platform for creative businesses such as event planners, photographers and florists. The platform is currently in beta and provides a customizable dashboard to streamline payments, logistical decisions and exchanges of suggestions between users and clients. HoneyBook aims to continue developing the product and expand operations using new funding. The company was founded in 2013 by CEO Oz Alon and is based in San Francisco, CA. At the time of the article the company was hiring.

Total raised

$465M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Nov 2021