SQUIRE streamlines the process of getting a haircut

For Black entrepreneurs Dave Salvant and Songe LaR­on what started out as an app idea to help individuals who struggled to find a good bar­bershop has transformed into a platform that is changing the landscape of the barber expe­rience.

According to Tech Crunch, they raised $8 million for their app SQUIRE during their first round of venture capital fi­nancing.

Salvant and LaRon are seasoned entrepreneurs who through their own experiences discovered that the process of finding a good barber can of­ten be inefficient. The two de­cided to team up and develop a solution.

The app—which was founded in 2015—con­nects barbers and customers. Through SQUIRE, individuals can find barbershops in their area, read customer reviews, and book appointments.

Customers also have the op­portunity to pay for their hair­cuts through the app. SQUIRE goes beyond booking haircut appointments, it provides bar­bers throughout the country with the platform to sell prod­ucts and promote their brand.

There is a wide range of shops that are included in the app’s directory, including large high-end shops and small lo­cally owned businesses. The app was launched in New York and expanded to cities like At­lanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It now features barbershops in 28 cities. Since its inception, there have been $100 million in transactions processed through the app. The fundraising round was led by Trinity Ventures.

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“Millions of men need hair­ cuts daily and are looking to find the right barbershop, but the process is usually unneces­sarily hard and time consum­ing,” said Salvant in an inter­view with Forbes. “SQUIRE lets you locate a barber, sched­ule your appointment and pay from anywhere you are, now making the process quick and convenient.”

The entrepreneurs plan on putting the money raised to­wards marketing and hiring engineers to work on the app’s infrastructure. “In talking to customers, we realized there was a lot of opportunity to build value in a backend man­agement system,” LaRon said in a statement, according to TechCrunch.

Both LaRon and Salvant are carving out a space in an in­dustry that is worth billions of dollars. According to Statista, the barber industry is expected to be valued at $26 billion by next year.

News One Staff

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