Boulevard, a business management software platform for self-care businesses, has raised $80 million in Series D funding led by JMI Equity, the company announced on Thursday.
The round values Los Angeles-based Boulevard at about $800 million post-money, CEO and co-founder Matt Danna told Crunchbase News. That’s “nearly double” the company’s previous valuation at the time of its August 2022 $70 million Series C raise, he said.
Existing backers Index Ventures and VMG Partners also participated in the latest financing. Other existing investors include BoxGroup, Bonfire Ventures and Ludlow Ventures. In total, Boulevard has raised about $188 million in funding since its 2016 inception.
The company started as an online booking platform for salons and spas. It has evolved over time into an AI-driven SaaS platform that powers a number of functions for appointment-based self-care businesses, including scheduling, personalized text and e-mail marketing, and payment processing.
Boulevard declined to reveal hard revenue figures, noting that it has seen “500%-plus” revenue growth since its 2022 funding round. More than 5,000 businesses — such as hair and nail salons, spas and medspas — use Boulevard, according to Danna. The company helps customers book more than 2 million appointments per month, and facilitates $5 billion in processed payments annually, he added.
Finding growth
A “huge” driver of recent growth for Boulevard over the past three years has been going after the medspa market, according to Danna.
Historically, medspas have operated on electronic medical record systems that focus on insurance coding and medical billing, he said.
“But medspas often don’t accept insurance anyway and want to provide an elevated patient experience, similar to what our salon and spa customers are able to provide to their clients,” he said. “It’s been three years since we really started going after the medspa market in earnest.”
Overall, the startup claims that it serves 15% of the U.S. medspa market, which amounted to an estimated $17 billion in 2024.
Boulevard’s flagship product is called Precision Scheduling. That offering leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to do things like analyze historical booking patterns, appointment durations, provider availability and sales forecasting “to suggest the most efficient appointment times in a way that maximizes revenue for the business,” Danna said.
Presently, Boulevard has 375 employees.
Backstory
Danna and co-founder Sean Stavropoulos, who serves as the company’s CTO, founded Boulevard after realizing the options to book salon appointments online was not readily available.
Danna said he would tease Stavropoulos, who was a friend and co-worker at the time at another company, about being “in desperate need of a haircut.”
“Whenever I’d give him a hard time about it, he’d tell me he just kept forgetting to call his salon during the day,” Danna recalls. “This was back in 2015, when you could book pretty much everything else online, so it didn’t make sense to us that you couldn’t book a haircut online.”
The pair started visiting salons and spas in the downtown Los Angeles area, posing as college students conducting a research project in an effort to discern the extent to which the businesses were or weren’t using technology.
“We came to learn that most of them did, in fact, have online booking systems that they were paying for, but they were so ill-suited to the very specific needs of their businesses that they just wouldn’t use them,” Danna recalls. “The more we learned, the more we realized we were onto something, and by 2016, Boulevard was officially born.”
Looking ahead, Boulevard plans to incorporate AI even further into its offering.
“We feel as though there are countless revenue-optimizing use cases for AI within these self-care businesses,” Danna said.
Matt Emery, partner at lead investor JMI Equity, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm viewed Boulevard as “a clear leader in the self-care market with a best-in-class product and many of the characteristics of JMI’s other leading vertical SaaS + payments businesses.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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