Fresha joins unicorn club after $80M KKR-led funding round

The London-based beauty and wellness booking platform has officially joined the UK unicorn club, achieving a valuation of over $1 billion. This milestone arrives at a time when the broader SaaS industry is debating its own future, making Fresha’s success all the more notable. The company announced on Thursday that it has raised $80 million from funds managed by KKR, structured as primary growth capital.

This latest funding round elevates Fresha to unicorn status, bringing its total capital raised since its 2015 founding to $285 million. The investment comes from KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth fund, which focuses on companies that have already achieved product-market fit and are seeking scale capital rather than early-stage runway.

The numbers Fresha disclosed alongside the announcement explain the strong investor appetite. The platform now serves more than 130,000 beauty and wellness businesses across the UK, Australasia, the Gulf, North America, and parts of Southeast Asia. It processes over 35 million appointments monthly, equating to roughly 420 million annually, against $15 billion in gross merchandise value. Annual revenue run-rate exceeds $140 million, growing at over 60% per year, and the business is profitable. The last disclosed valuation, from a Series C extension in late 2021, was $640 million.

Founded by William Zeqiri and Nick Miller in 2015, Fresha has spent the last five years quietly displacing older booking incumbents in its core markets. It has expanded into payments, capital, and more recently, AI-driven scheduling and marketing tools. Zeqiri called reaching unicorn status “a proud milestone” and said the round will fund further global expansion and AI investment. Miller, the company’s chief product officer, framed the round as validation from customers who already use the platform as their primary operating layer.

KKR’s due diligence process ran for over a year and included surveys of more than 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 ranked Fresha first across software quality, ease of use, support, setup, 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 was “highly impressed with the consistent performance.”

The deal arrives at an awkward moment for the SaaS category Fresha occupies. Salesforce is down roughly 30% year-to-date, and the broader software complex has spent 2026 debating whether per-seat pricing is the right model for the AI era. A vertical platform earning revenue from payments and marketplace fees as well as subscriptions is precisely the kind of business that argument least threatens, which is likely part of what KKR’s team concluded.

Fresha said the new capital will go toward expansion in the US, continental Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and toward AI features across booking automation, marketing, accounting, and workforce management. The company did not disclose a planned timeline for an IPO or any further fundraising.