Booker

Booker grew out of SpaFinder, a spa-industry company that had built the scheduling technology at the core of the platform. Josh McArthur led the spin-out of that technology and started Booker in 2011. The team chose to focus on spas and salons because health and wellness businesses share similar needs for scheduling, staff management, customer management, and point of sale. McArthur said the team learned focus the hard way, with some ups and downs after exploring other markets before returning to its core.

The spin-out was not simple. SpaFinder had many legacy shareholders, so the team spent six to nine months restructuring the company, setting licensing agreements, and assigning IP. Revolution led a $15 million Series A in November 2011. SpaFinder had provided the initial base platform, but much of the early investment went into building Booker's own infrastructure so it no longer relied on its parent. Revenue in the first year was in the low single-digit millions. The company had about 25 to 30 people at the time and now has around 200.

Booker's first customers came through the existing spa and salon base that SpaFinder had built. The company's growth then came from expanding within that base. Its pricing runs from roughly $100 to $250 per month per location, with multi-location brands paying more for API access and custom development. Around 10,000 locations are live on the platform. Subscriptions account for about 70% of revenue, and merchant processing plus the Frederick add-on make up the rest.

The biggest lever has been payments. Booker operates as an integrated software vendor, leading with software and earning commissions from merchant processing partners. Clients use it for deposits, prepayments, memberships, and online bookings, which all require card processing. Booker processed almost $3.5 billion in transactions across its locations in the last full year. The First Data partnership, which began with First Data's investment in the 2015 round, gives Booker access to a large distribution network of banks and ISOs. McArthur said the company keeps gross churn below 2% per month, and that about half of churn comes from customers going out of business.

The company acquired Frederick, a marketing automation product from a small Bay Area team. Frederick applies yield-management ideas from the travel industry to local services, sending targeted offers to past customers when a provider's calendar has open capacity. McArthur described very high conversion and retention, with some customers generating over $100,000 in service business through Frederick alone.

Booker has not raised new funding since its 2015 round and says it has about 24 months of runway. The company reports nearly 200 employees across New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Scottsdale. Its current strategy combines retention, payment upsells, and channel partnerships to keep customer acquisition costs low.