Platform Models Gain Investment Backing in B2B

Platform models serving various business verticals have been gaining currency — literally,

To that end, Boulevard, which focuses on providing a platform as a service to spas and salons, said it had raised $1 million in a Series A funding round.

The funding round was led by Index Ventures, with additional participation from Bonfire Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, BoxGroup and Luma Launch.

The company said it will use the new funding to add staff across departments ranging from product, business development to engineering.

The company said its platform as a service helps salons, spas and other appointment-based businesses streamline booking and scheduling, inventory management, payroll and payments, amid other functions.

Boulevard has said that corporate clients using its offerings have seen, within the first few months of deployment, a 16 percent increase in services booked; an 18 percent increase in retail revenue; a 76 percent decrease in time spent on the phone and an 18 percent decline in no-shows and late cancellations.

Comtravo

Separately, Comtravo, a German firm that offers a platform geared toward travel bookings, said this past week that it raised 21 million Euros in venture capital.

The firm said that the funding round was led by Endeit Capital and also participation from new investors including Deutsche Bank, AER Ticket (which sells travel tickets across Europe) and existing investors such as Project A and Creandum. The company has said its software takes text-based requests such as emails, turns that information into unstructured data, and offers personalized travel offers.

As reported by the site eu-startups.com, Michael Riegel, founder and CEO of Comtravo, stated: “The German business travel market is huge — 52.5 billion Euros. But it’s also very fragmented and shaped by tedious and inefficient processes. With Comtravo, we want to radically simplify the management of business travel. Since founding the company in 2015, we have managed to automate 60 percent of the processes by using technology, and we enjoy popularity from our customers and the continued support from our investors.” The company’s client base spans more than 700 customers, and the site said they are mostly medium-sized businesses, where flight and hotel bookings are 60 percent automated through language processing and artificial intelligence. The company said that the new funding will be used to bring that automation percentage to 80 percent over the near term.

Lease Accounting, Too

Here in the U.S., LeaseQuery, which is one of the largest providers of lease accounting software, said that it has received an investment from Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division, to the tune of $40 million in Series A funding.

The tech-driven offering helps companies transition to new lease accounting standards mandated by the FASB, IASB and the GASB.   The platform is used by more than 10,000 accountants, according to the company, but in terms of movement toward compliance with those new standards, only 5 percent of companies have completed the transition, as noted by LeaseQuery. The firm said that the new accounting rules add trillions of dollars to balance sheets of companies across every vertical.

In a release, LeaseQuery said it is “on track” to notch growth in 2019, after having seen 708 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2018.  The company said that its client base has grown from 500 companies at the end of 2018 to nearly 1,000 today.