Salon and spa discovery start-up Fabogo raises $2.25 million

Salon and spa discovery start-up Fabogo has raised $2.25 million from its existing investor Dunamis Ventures. This is the third round of investment for the platform.

The company enables customers to discover local salons and spas, and allows them to call and book appointments through its platform.

The company was seed funded with $1 million in Jan 2016 and later raised $500,000 in angel funding in May 2015. The firm will use the fund to strengthen its technology and to acquire users, said its co-founder Prasanjeet Roy. Fabogo was founded by Mohammad Ali Akmal and Prasanjeet Roy in March 2015.

Two months after its launch, the company started operations in Dubai. Later, the same year in August, it entered Pune and Mumbai. Dubai-based Mazkara, a parent company of Fabogo, is looking to expand to different geographies including Abu Dhabi and Sharjah in the UAE. In India, it plans to expand its presence in, Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata.

On growth front, Fabogo claims to have 3,30,000 monthly visitors, divided equally between Dubai and India. It claims the number of users is growing 20% month-on-month and has 55% repeat user rate. According to Roy, the start-up already has broken even in Dubai and is looking to break even in Mumbai and Pune by November this year.

“We aim to become the market leaders in our existing cities by March next year. For that, we aim to grow at about 25,000 user downloads month-on-month,” said Roy. He added that the company expects at least 5-7% of the users that come on the platform to book and transact from the app.

The beauty industry in India is currently highly fragmented and dominated by local service providers. Besides, a number of online on-demand beauty services startups have come up in the segment over the past year.

Recently, on demand service platforms started pivoting from categories to a new pink collar workforce, which is beauty.

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In India, the beauty industry is close to Rs 500 bn, with services contributing to Rs 200 bn and is growing at a rate of 18% CAGR. Other players operating in this space in India include ManageMySpa, recently rebranded as Zenoti, Be U Salon, Belita, Vyomo, and Nykaa.

Gingerpan Swapkart Pvt. Ltd-owned online aggregator of branded parlours, Be U Salons, had raised $600,000 in a seed round led by Gaurav Kachru of 5ideas Superfuel Fund in April. Glam Studios had secured angel funding of Rs 2 crore in September 2016. In June, beauty product discovery platform VanityCask has raised seed funds from Singapore-based angel and venture capital firm RB Investments.