Funding alert: Glamplus raises around INR 2 cr Pre-Series-A round led by Inflection Point Ventures

Salon-focused SaaS platform Glamplus has raised INR 2 crore in a Pre-Series A led by Inflection Point Ventures, an Indian angel investment platform. Few of the other investors in this round are Anil G (Co-Founder and COO at Bounce), Sachin Khandelwal (MD and 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 enhancement of product and tech capabilities and business expansion. The funds will also be utilized in scaling to 3000 partners in the next six months along with vertical expansion of the business line.

Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, Inflection Point Venture says, “Salons, spa and gyms form one of the largest portion 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 visits frequency. 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.”

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.”

An Aim to Digitize the Informal Economy of Salons Gyms and Spas

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 customer appointments, staff management, and their suppliers through a simple dashboard. The platform also helps them with analytical reports to understand the needs of customers, their visit patterns and other insights that can help businesses to elevate the customer experience.

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 a collective ecosystem to improve customer experience. With the help of the portal, partners can discover information of customers for upsell and better retention. This is a step towards organizing the informal economy by standardizing the processes.

The startup has scaled to 500 paying partners in less than three months across three 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 US$200 billion 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 ten million salons in South East 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 two-three years with higher engagement offerings and enhanced tech product capabilities.

Support for New-age Entrepreneurs

Inflection Point Ventures is a 3500+ strong members angel investing firm that supports new-age entrepreneurs, providing them monetary and experiential capital by connecting them with a diverse group of investors. Believing that ‘everyone can grow with startups’, IPV was started in 2018 and plans to invest INR 155 crore in 2021 across 60 startups. IPV’s investor base is seeing a massive influx of highly accomplished CXOs and HNIs, looking to invest in startups with rational valuation and sustainable business model.