KKR has made an $80M primary investment into Fresha at a valuation of over $1B, taking the company to unicorn status.
This is a milestone close to a decade in the making. BECO Fund I first backed Fresha in 2016, investing at a $20M post-money valuation when it was a young, founder-led team generating no revenue, with a simple but contrarian idea. Even then, the company was signing up around 2K merchants a month with almost no marketing spend, entirely through self-serve onboarding that required no human contact. The term “product-led growth” was only being coined that same year; in hindsight, Fresha was an early example of PLG, and the strength of that motion became clearer the longer we tracked the business. Our conviction then was straightforward. The global beauty and wellness industry was enormous, deeply fragmented, and still run largely on pen and paper. Fresha gave merchants genuinely excellent business software for free, with no subscription fees, won the market on product, and monetized through its consumer marketplace and integrated payments. Merchants would come for the tool and stay for the network.
That thesis has played out. Today, Fresha is used by over 130K beauty and wellness businesses globally, facilitates more than 35M appointments a month, and runs over $15B in annual GMV. Having first won merchants with free software, Fresha later introduced subscriptions, and today, its entire active partner base is monetized, alongside marketplace and payments revenue that continue to scale, and the business is now profitable. We knew early that software in our region alone could never support the business Fresha was capable of becoming, and that realizing its potential would mean going global; whether the team could execute on that was the open question, and they have. Fresha was born in the UAE, built its foundation in the UK, and has grown into a global business. It now holds leading positions in the GCC, UK and Australasia, with a fast-growing presence across North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Total capital raised to date is $285M.
Fresha continues to extend its product surface in ways that deepen merchant stickiness. Because it owns the scheduling layer, it has launched AI Concierge, an AI receptionist that answers inbound calls, books and reschedules appointments, and handles client questions 24/7 on the merchant’s behalf. It has also introduced Fresha Capital, embedding financing for merchants inside the platform. Each new product makes Fresha more central to how a business operates and harder to replace.
A few words on what this means for us. The $80M from KKR went in as primary capital, with a small secondary component alongside it that was priced at a steep discount to the primary. We did not sell any of our position in this round. Holding it has meant staying patient through a period when growth-stage valuations re-rated, and the company had to play a longer game, and this outcome is the payoff of that conviction. KKR has come in with a minority position, and with Fresha now profitable, the company is unlikely to require meaningful further primary capital. We expect that to create healthy demand for secondary liquidity among existing shareholders over time. We remain closely engaged with William Zequiri and the company, and we intend to be measured and opportunistic about how and when we realize value rather than rushing to exit.