Wahanda is a UK-based platform that lets consumers find and book hair and beauty appointments by time and location while offering salon management software, usually for free. It monetizes bookings by taking a commission—20% in the UK and 15% in the rest of Europe. The company has pursued growth through roll-ups and acquisitions; the purchase of ZenSoon added about 650 salons and marked its fifth acquisition, bringing the platform to roughly 20,000 salons. Wahanda recently received €65M ($73M) in funding from Recruit Holdings, which now owns 80% after buying out other investors. Leadership says the company will shift toward integrating acquisitions into a single platform while continuing European consolidation and eyeing a likely U.S. acquisition within the next year. It has no current plans to expand beyond hair and beauty and cites a ~€100B ($100B) European market with fewer than 2% of salons online as its opportunity. Wahanda is a London-based hair and beauty marketplace that allows customers to browse and book appointments at over 12,000 salons and spas throughout Europe. The company employs 210 people across Europe. It intends to use the funding to accelerate its European growth and expected to be in eight countries by the end of June, with further expansion plans thereafter. In the months prior to the funding announcement Wahanda acquired Germany’s Salonmeister (October 2014), Austria’s Beautycheck (April 2015) and acqui-hired the Lithuanian mobile app development agency LemonLabs team (January 2015). The company secured $46M in funding which coincided with an ownership change involving its existing investor Recruit Holdings. Wahanda operates a hair and beauty marketplace focused on booking and industry-leading software for customer service. The company positions itself as a kind of "Zappos for health and beauty." This year Wahanda raised $26 million in growth funding from RGIP, Fidelity Growth Partners and Lepe Partners. It has acquired Salonmeister and plans to integrate the two businesses into a single global platform. Salonmeister is Berlin-based, was founded two years ago, and serves over 1,000 spa and salon suppliers across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Wahanda is explicitly pursuing continental European scale; the article notes no main competitor in Europe while citing U.S. players StyleSeat and Lifebooker and Japan's HotPepperBeauty as analogs. Wahanda operates an online health and beauty marketplace that lets people search for and book treatments, obtain discounted offers, and review outlets. The site uses a Grouponesque offers model and is described as a vertical marketplace akin to TripAdvisor or OpenTable. Since launching, it has grown to about 10 million visitors a year, 250,000 businesses listed and 5,000 exclusive health and beauty offers. The company was founded in 2008 by Lopo Champalimaud and Salim Mitha; backers include Brent Hoberman, Stefan Glaenzer, Ambient Sound Investment, founding engineers at Skype, and Wolf Hengst. CEO Lopo Champalimaud says the vision is to "do for health, beauty and wellness what Amazon did for books." The new funding will be used to accelerate growth in the UK and potentially overseas. Wahanda operates a vertical social network and marketplace for spas and wellness services, combining a large spa directory with time-limited daily offers. The company says it has built the world’s biggest vertical database of health and beauty spas, listing 10,000 venues globally, including 4,600 in the UK. Wahanda has positioned itself to be the “Amazon of wellness” and uses group-buying mechanics similar to Groupon to drive transactions. The site soft‑launched in the U.S. in October 2009 as it expands beyond its initial markets. The article notes the global spa economy is worth an estimated $60 billion, framing the market opportunity. Wahanda’s main competitor mentioned is U.S.-based SpaFinder, which has just over 6,000 listings.

Total raised

$153M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jun 2015