The London-based beauty and wellness booking platform has joined the UK unicorn club at a $1bn-plus valuation, in a deal that lands while the broader SaaS complex is busy arguing about its own funeral.
Fresha, the London-based booking and payments platform for salons and spas, has raised $80m from funds managed by KKR in a deal that values the company at more than $1bn, the company said on Thursday.
The round, structured as primary growth capital, takes Fresha to unicorn status and lifts the total raised since 2015 to $285m.
The cheque comes from KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth fund, the firm’s growth-equity arm, which writes into companies that are already past the product-market-fit stage and are looking for scale capital rather than runway.
The numbers Fresha disclosed alongside the announcement explain the appetite. The platform is used by more than 130,000 beauty and wellness businesses across the UK, Australasia, the Gulf, North America and parts of South-East Asia, and processes more than 35 million appointments a month, or roughly 420 million a year, against $15bn in annual gross merchandise value.
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Annual revenue run-rate stands at more than $140m, growing at over 60% a year, and the business is profitable. The last time Fresha disclosed a valuation, in a Series C extension in late 2021, the figure was $640m.
Founded in 2015 by William Zeqiri and Nick Miller, Fresha has spent the past five years quietly displacing the older booking incumbents in its core markets and pushing into payments, capital, and, more recently, AI-driven scheduling and marketing tools.
Zeqiri, in a statement, called reaching unicorn status “a proud milestone” and said the round would fund further global expansion and AI investment.
Miller, the company’s chief product officer, framed the round as validation from customers, who he said were already using the platform as their primary operating layer.
KKR’s diligence ran for more than a year and included surveys of over 1,000 beauty and wellness businesses across the US, UK, Ireland, the EU and Australia, plus interviews with customers, former employees and competitors.
The research, according to KKR, ranked Fresha first across software quality, ease of use, support, set-up and marketplace strength, with an average score of 8.1 out of 10 against a competitor average of 6.7.
Patrick Devine, a partner on KKR’s Tech Growth team, said Fresha had built “a differentiated platform combining software, financial services and marketplace capabilities with embedded AI.”
Marta Szczerba, a director on the same team, said she had followed the founders for years and had been “highly impressed with the consistent performance.”
The deal lands at an awkward moment for the SaaS category Fresha sits inside. Salesforce is down roughly 30% year-to-date and the broader software complex has spent 2026 absorbing the argument that per-seat pricing is the wrong shape for the AI era.
A vertical platform earning revenue from payments and marketplace fees as well as subscriptions is, on the face of it, the kind of business that argument is least worried about, which is presumably part of what KKR’s diligence team concluded.
Fresha said the new capital will go toward expansion in the US, continental Europe, Africa and South-East Asia, and toward AI features across booking automation, marketing, accounting and workforce management. The company did not disclose a planned timeline to an IPO or any further fundraising.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
