Dubai-based beauty and wellness startup, Mazkara, has raised $1 Mn in a seed round funding from Dubai based Dunamis Ventures. Prior to this, the startup had bagged $500K as angel investment from PE Investors in Dubai.
The raised capital will be used by Mazkara to expand its product team and subsequently launch operations in Delhi, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi.
Launched in 2015 by Prasanjeet Roy and Mohammad Ali Akmal, Mazkara, enables customers to search and discover hyperlocal salons and spas, find best offers/deals and call & book appointments with ease.
Mazkara’s current business model is Pay-per-Lead based wherein they charge a small fee for every customer directed to a partnered venue. This keeps the venue owners happy as they do not have to pay up-front and only after they receive customers through the platform.
Prasanjeet Roy, co-founder & CEO of Mazkara said, “Our online booking engine is already in place, but will be rolled out to our users, only once we have a critical mass of venues who have adopted our business-side app into their operations. Most of these venues are small mom-n-pop set ups, thus a learning curve comes attached with adopting the product. Our aim is to educate and mature them over the next few months.”
With over 3000 daily visitors increasing at 15% month-on-month, the startup has over 90,000 monthly visitors and gets an average of 500 appointments daily.
“Our target markets in India and the Middle East have over 40,000 beauty & wellness venues, which together receive over a 144 Mn appointments annually. Currently, not even 2% of these venues have any active online presence, and a negligible 0 to 0.2% of these appointments are being booked online. Our value proposition is simple and strong – we first want to bring these venues online, by giving them a great platform to be discovered on by users, and then empowering them with tools to market and manage their businesses,” said Prasanjeet.
The startup which coined the term ‘Glam-tech’ took an international-first approach by debuting in Dubai in May and subsequently launched in Pune, in August 2015. Besides, Mazkara aims to break-even Dubai operationally by September this year, and is eying Singapore as their next international market.
In Dubai Mazkara is competing with Rocket Internet backed Vaniday, and in India it competes with Purplle, ManageMySpa – rebranded as Zenoti, Belita, Vyomo and Nykaa among others.
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