Urban operates an on-demand wellness app offering at-home massage and beauty (when measures allow), personal training, yoga, mindfulness and other services. The company was founded in 2014 by Jack Tang and Giles Williams and is based in London. Urban now offers over 50 in-person and online wellness services delivered by independent professionals across London, Paris, Manchester and Birmingham. It raised £5.9m on crowdfunding website Seedrs, with BNF Capital contributing £4m and more than 800 investors taking part. The Seedrs campaign was the platform’s third-largest raise of the year. Urban intends to use the funds to add more services and expand into new cities. Urban is a London-headquartered platform that lets users book on-demand wellness services such as massage, osteopathy, facials and nail services. It currently operates in several U.K. cities and Paris. The company is expanding its service categories — including planned fitness offerings — and intends to add digital-only wellness products alongside a content push to lower user acquisition costs when entering new cities and countries. Urban has begun recruiting a 30-person engineering team in Vilnius to work on client-facing apps, practitioner business software, its corporate offering and data science projects. Founder Jack Tang says the move into services beyond massage has brought the company near profitability and improved unit economics, with 80% of new service revenue driven by existing customers. The company also strengthened security after a 2018 customer-database exposure that was subsequently fixed. Urban (formerly Urban Massage) operates an app and logistics platform that enables customers to book vetted massage therapists with as little as an hour's notice. The company is expanding beyond massage to offer nail technicians, GOsC-regulated osteopaths, and skin therapists while planning to add fitness, yoga, meditation and other mental-wellbeing and digital therapy services. Since launching in 2014, Urban says it has delivered 389,000 treatments, has 101,000 active users and 2,500 active therapists, and records a 42% repeat booking rate. Practitioners on the platform have collectively earned £16.4 million over the past four years. Urban has grown both organically and via acquisitions (Milk Beauty and B2B-focused Freauty) and has introduced a retail channel, “Urban Curates,” in partnership with brands including Estée Lauder Companies and Unilever Prestige. The product focus remains a holistic wellness marketplace underpinned by its existing logistics tech and app experience. Urban Massage operates a web and mobile platform allowing customers to book same-hour or same-day in-home or at-work massages. The service matches customers to a pool of vetted freelance massage professionals, charges set fees by treatment and duration, and takes a cut of each booking. Its apps calculate therapist travel time and scheduling to display available slots. The company says revenue has doubled in recent quarters and is now processing over $160,000 of bookings per month, up from $40,000 in October 2014. Urban Massage plans a multi-city national roll-out beyond London and is developing a new product to compete with SaaS players. Management indicated it will likely raise another round in about 12 months. Urban Massage operates an on-demand service that lets customers book various types of massages at home or at work, with bookings priced by type and time. The company runs a consumer-facing web app and is developing iOS and Android apps, while also offering a B2B white‑label service to London hotels and workplaces. It uses a pool of vetted freelance massage professionals and takes a cut of each booking, and is building a backend scheduling system that ties into third‑party APIs such as Transport for London alongside its own algorithms to reduce travel time. Since its beta launch five months ago the startup has processed over 450 bookings, representing more than £30k in revenue. The founders are Jack Tang and Giles Williams (previously founders of TheStudentJob.com). Urban Massage currently operates in London and has plans to expand geographically and to add additional personal services such as physiotherapy and beauty treatments. The company has moved into White Bear Yard, the co‑working space of its new investor, Passion Capital.

Total raised

$22M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Sep 2020