Fresha
“Can a vertical booking marketplace become the financial OS for the global beauty & wellness industry by layering payments and capital on top of free SaaS?”
Founded2015
HQLondon, United Kingdom
FoundersWilliam Zeqiri, Nicholas Miller
Latest roundDebt / Growth, $80M (2026)
Valuation$1B+ (2026)
IndustryVertical SaaS / Beauty & Wellness
The story
Founded 2015 as Shedul, a free salon scheduling tool. Pivoted in 2020 to Fresha — a two-sided beauty/wellness marketplace monetizing through embedded payments rather than SaaS subscriptions. Now layering embedded finance (Fresha Capital) on top of its payments volume to deepen monetization per merchant, following the Toast/Shopify playbook for vertical SaaS.
Product timeline
2015
Founded as Shedul — free salon booking software· pivot
2020
Rebranded from Shedul to Fresha, launched consumer marketplace· pivot
2024
Expanded Adyen for Platforms integration including American Express acceptance· banking
2026
Launched Fresha Capital embedded lending with Adyen across 7 markets· lending
2026
Raised $80M from KKR at $1B+ valuation (unicorn)· ipo
In the press
embeddedfinancereview.com ↗Coverage sourced from Embedded Finance Review — a content partner for this report. All articles are © their original authors; click any card to open the source.
The stack
3 layers disclosed in Fresha’s embedded-finance stack
Payments / PSP
Lending
in the full report
FX & payouts
in the full report
Accounting gap: minor
3 more providers across 2 layers, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.