📈 Fresha Secures $31m in funding

This is Cliff Equity, the UK’s business newsletter that keeps you informed on what’s important in tech, business and finance in less than 5 minutes

In today’s stories:

  • Fresha's $31M Splash: Turning Spas into Tech Titans with a Dash of AI Magic!

  • DEFCON AI Bags £34M to Turn Military Chaos into Clockwork — And Maybe Fix Your Deliveries Too!

  • BeyondMath Bags £6.5m to Supercharge Engineering—Farewell, Victorian Tech!

The summary: Fresha’s shaking up the beauty and wellness world by combining cutting-edge tech with clever business solutions, making salons and spas smoother, smarter, and ready to conquer the globe!

The details:

  • Fresha, the beauty and wellness platform, has bagged a $31 million venture debt from J.P. Morgan to fuel global expansion and sharpen its AI-driven capabilities – robots in beauty salons? Why not!

  • With over $185 million raised, including a hefty $150 million Series C, Fresha is on the brink of profitability and poised to shake up the beauty industry by making business software subscription-free and accessible to all.

  • Fresha’s 110,000 merchants across 120 countries are reaping the benefits of free booking systems, payment solutions, and insights galore – because nothing says "pampered" like streamlined data-driven beauty.

  • After processing over $35 billion in transactions and achieving a stunning 67% revenue growth in 2023, Fresha is poised to keep glowing up – with J.P. Morgan more than happy to cheer them on!

Why it matters: Fresha’s financial windfall and rapid growth show that even in the world of haircuts and massages, tech innovation reigns supreme. By democratising business software and integrating AI wizardry, they’re helping salons and spas run slicker than ever before, all while pampering clients with personalised services. In short, beauty is now big business – and Fresha’s set to make it even bigger, one algorithm at a time.

The summary: DEFCON AI is turbocharging military logistics with disruption-proof tech, giving our defence an edge while potentially saving the rest of us from those dreaded "your parcel is delayed" notifications!

The details:

  • DEFCON AI, the whizz-kid of military tech, just secured a cool $44 million in seed funding, with Bessemer Venture Partners leading the charge. Naturally, they’ve added a former Lockheed Martin CTO and some venture capital bigwigs to their board.

  • The company’s mission? To revolutionise how defence operations handle disruptions, ensuring that supplies and manpower arrive on time, even when things go pear-shaped – which, let’s be honest, is often.

  • DEFCON AI’s high-tech algorithms give military planners the power to swiftly respond to chaos, making them the new darling of the Department of Defence (DoD) and beyond.

  • With this fresh cash injection, DEFCON AI plans to scale up, boost R&D, and bring their dual-use tech to both military and commercial sectors, potentially saving the day for logistics everywhere.

Why it matters: DEFCON AI is essentially giving military planners a crystal ball, letting them dodge disruptions. With near-peer rivals upping their tech game, the ability to predict chaos could be the difference between a well-executed operation and an absolute shambles. Plus, it’s not just the military—commercial enterprises might soon be using this tech to prevent your online orders from going MIA.

The summary: BeyondMath’s £6.5m funding and cutting-edge AI tech are poised to catapult engineering from its Victorian roots into a thrilling new era of supercharged simulations.

The details:

  • BeyondMath, a Cambridge-based AI startup, has bagged £6.5m in seed funding to shake up engineering with its fancy AI multi-physics simulation platform.

  • UP.Partners took the lead on this funding spree, with Insight Partners and JLR's InMotion Ventures also chipping in.

  • Founded by Alan Patterson and Darren Garvey, ex-Google and eBay whiz-kids, BeyondMath promises to speed up engineering iterations by 1,000 times—just a casual upgrade from the Stone Age tech.

  • The company’s new NVIDIA DGX H200 system will supercharge its simulations, potentially making physics-based engineering as thrilling as watching paint dry in hyper-speed.

Why it matters: BeyondMath’s £6.5m funding is set to revolutionise engineering by replacing outdated tech with their turbo-charged AI simulations. With former Google and eBay experts at the helm and a shiny new NVIDIA DGX H200 system, they’re not just tinkering—they’re transforming physics-based engineering into something that might actually excite engineers. Essentially, they're putting the "quantum leap" back in "quantum leap," making old-school methods look like Victorian contraptions.