Front Desk, a software as a service platform and mobile business management tool that can handle things like scheduling, payments and client management, today announced that it has raised a $4 million Series A round. This round was led by Floodgate, with participation from existing investors, including Second Avenue Partners, Version One Ventures and Expedia founder and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton and others.
Together with the $3.2 million round the company raised last September, this brings the company’s total funding to $7.2 million. As part of this new round, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, Jr. and Version One Ventures’ Boris Wertz will join the Front Desk board.
Front Desk, which launched less than a year ago, mostly focuses on personal services businesses like yoga studios, gyms, tour operators, music schools and tutoring centers. The company says it currently has about 1,000 businesses in 20 countries on its platform. To complement its comprehensive web and mobile apps, Front Desk also offers dedicated apps for staff, new client signups and client sign-in.
As for why Front Desk decided to raise this quickly after closing its first round, the company’s CEO Jon Zimmerman tells me that this new capital will allow the company to “to grow our team, invest in product and marketing, and tap into the global opportunity we see within the personal services industry.” Indeed, Front Desk plans to double its workforce by the end of the year, both on the engineering and marketing side.
Front Desk offers mobile apps that allow small and medium businesses to track scheduling and workshops and handle online registration. Through its billing and payments tools, the company is on track to process more than $100 million in payments this year.
Companies pay Front Desk through a combination of a tier pricing scheme and a cut of their transactions. Fees start at a minimum of $45 per month and then move to a percentage of the transaction volume as companies grow.
Zimmerman noted that Front Desk’s goal is to increase its user’s revenue by “removing and reducing revenue leakage through billing and attendance tracking; and helping them to reduce their overhead interest.” And the better its users do, the better Front Desk does as well.
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