Antoine Puymirat still remembers what it felt like to sell his first company. ClicRDV went to PagesJaunes in 2011, a tidy exit for booking software that served dentists, lawyers, hair salons—anyone who needed appointments, really. It was also, he realized too late, the problem. Build for everyone and you understand no one. Worse, the economics only worked if you gave the software away and made money somewhere else. Lead generation, mostly. Salon owners paid nothing upfront, which sounds great until you realize they were paying in other, less obvious ways.
So when Puymirat started over in 2016, he did something almost perverse by startup standards: he decided to charge money. For software. To small business owners. In an industry where the dominant players were giving tools away and taking a slice of bookings instead.
Planity now controls a quarter of France's hair and beauty salons. That's somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 establishments, depending on which company press release you believe—the Series C materials from February 2024 said 40,000, the current About page claims 50,000. Either figure is remarkable for a subscription model in a market where competitors like Treatwell and Booksy operate as commission-based marketplaces, essentially behaving like the Uber of haircuts.
The company hit $40 million in annual recurring revenue as of 2023, growing at 60% year-over-year. InfraVia Capital Partners led a $48 million Series C in February 2024, with backing from Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Revaia, and Bpifrance, pushing total funding north of $105 million. That's a lot of capital for a business that makes its money €59 at a time—the approximate monthly fee for basic booking features, rising to roughly €89 with point-of-sale functionality, according to third-party comparison sites. The company's official pricing page, for what it's worth, just tells you to call sales.
Why Beauty Salons Aren't Restaurants
The marketplace model dominates online booking. Treatwell, owned by Japan's Recruit Holdings and assembled through acquisitions including France's ZenSoon, clips every transaction. So does Poland-based Booksy, which bought France's Kiute in 2021 to enter the market. Their pitch to salons is seductive: you only pay when we send you customers. Risk-free customer acquisition.
Puymirat thinks that's fundamentally misunderstanding the business. "If you go to the same hair salon once every six weeks, you don't need to rediscover the same hair salon every time," he told TechCrunch. Repeat rates in beauty run high. The discovery problem—finding a new restaurant for date night, a hotel in an unfamiliar city—barely exists. Taking commission on repeat bookings is, in his view, extracting rent from relationships that were already working. The discount model these platforms use to drive first-time visits? Even worse, he argues. It trains customers to wait for deals and erodes the salon's pricing power.
Planity charges a flat subscription instead. Salons get online scheduling, automated SMS reminders, waitlist management, deposit collection, inventory tracking, loyalty programs. No commission on bookings. No pressure to discount services to attract customers from a marketplace.
The company claims salons see up to 16% revenue growth in their first year on the platform, with a 75% reduction in no-shows from automated reminders sent 24 hours before appointments. France has reached profitability, though Planity declined to share specific margins. Perhaps more telling: the churn rate appears low enough that the company can afford to spend heavily on sales upfront and recoup it over time. Subscription businesses live and die on retention.
The Field Army
Here's the other break from software orthodoxy: Planity sells face-to-face.
The company runs what Puymirat calls a "field sales army"—a term that sounds martial and is meant to. Reps deploy city by city, signing up salons in person through a mix of outbound calls and, yes, door-knocking. At a SaaStock Paris talk, Puymirat laid out the playbook: find ambassador salons in each new market, use them as proof points, then blanket the area with boots on the ground.
It's expensive. Planity employs around 400 people, though LinkedIn profiles suggest the number has crept past 500. After the Series C, the company said it planned to add 300 more. That's substantial payroll for software that could, in theory, be sold with email campaigns and free trials.
But solo hairdressers and small salon teams aren't browsing SaaS review sites. They're not early adopters. Many are skeptical of switching systems—understandably, since learning new software while running a business is nobody's idea of fun. Someone needs to walk them through it, answer questions, demonstrate the tablet interface. Jérémy Queroy, Planity's VP of Sales with prior stints at Cerruti and Schwarzkopf Professional, brings beauty industry credibility that matters in these conversations. Paul Vonderscher, CTO since 2016 and formerly of PagesJaunesDoc, handles the technical architecture. The combination works: Puymirat's booking domain expertise, Queroy's industry knowledge, Vonderscher's engineering.
The consumer-facing side now attracts 8 million monthly visitors and processes 10 million appointments per month, with 4 million booked directly through Planity's self-serve interface rather than through salon staff entering walk-ins. That's meaningful traffic. Not OpenTable-level, maybe, but respectable for a vertical platform.
Exporting the Model
Germany and Belgium came next. Planity established a German subsidiary in Cologne and a Belgian entity in Waterloo in 2022. By 2024, the company claimed the number-two position in both markets—2,000 establishments in Germany, 1,000 in Belgium. The field sales model exports, though competitors have had years to entrench. Treatwell operates across Europe. Booksy has scale on both sides of the Atlantic.
Planity's wager is that salon owners eventually tire of paying commissions on repeat business and will switch to subscription software if someone bothers to explain why. In a June 2025 interview with Frenchweb, Puymirat positioned the company as France's standard-bearer in beauty SaaS, with ambitions—naturally—to consolidate the European market. Southern Europe launches in 2025, though specifics remain vague. Spain? Italy? He didn't say.
The challenge isn't merely signing up salons. Booking platforms need network effects on both sides: enough consumer traffic to drive value for merchants, enough merchants to keep consumers returning. Planity has the visitor numbers. Scaling that across fragmented European markets, each with local competitors and different consumer habits, requires sustained spending on marketing and sales. The Series C helps, but burning capital on international expansion while maintaining French profitability is a balancing act.
Operating System Ambitions
The product has evolved considerably beyond simple scheduling. Planity now offers what amounts to a full operating system for salons: NF525-certified point-of-sale software (required for French tax compliance), integrated card terminals, Tap to Pay on iPhone via Stripe Connect at €9 monthly plus 0.99% per transaction, inventory management, loyalty programs, marketing SMS, analytics dashboards. The company even helps salons embed a "Book online" button directly in their Google Business profiles, capturing mobile search traffic.
Some of the Series C funding is earmarked for conversational AI to handle phone bookings, which remain a substantial channel for many small salons. It's a logical extension—if you're already the system of record for appointments, capturing voice bookings just means controlling more of the workflow.
Le Monde called Planity the "Doctolib of wellness" in March 2024, invoking France's dominant medical booking platform. Puymirat has floated the idea of expanding into adjacent wellness verticals: yoga studios, meditation centers, alternative medicine practitioners. With practitioner verification, he's quick to add, to avoid credibility issues.
That's a bigger leap than it sounds. Medical and beauty appointments share scheduling DNA, sure. But unregulated wellness opens questions about liability, brand positioning, and whether customers view booking a haircut the same way they book a Reiki session. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.
What $105 Million Buys
Planity has raised capital steadily since 2017. Alven led a €1.5 million seed round alongside angels from KelDoc, PriceMatch, and eFounders. Bpifrance, Crédit Mutuel Innovation, and Revaia (formerly Gaia Capital Partners) have participated in multiple subsequent rounds. InfraVia's Series C was the largest to date.
The money funds the sales army, international offices, product development, and the messy reality of competing in markets where others got there first. It also signals something about ambition. Vertical SaaS businesses typically grow steadily but slowly, compounding modest wins into durable revenue streams. Planity is staffing up aggressively and pushing into competitive geographies before achieving truly dominant scale at home. That's a choice—spend now to grab market share, or grow carefully and risk letting competitors lock up key markets.
Puymirat is building his second act with lessons from the first tattooed on his brain. Stay vertical. Charge the customer, not someone else. Sell in person, even if it costs more. The French market validates the thesis. Europe will reveal whether it travels. The booking wars in beauty aren't close to settled, but Planity earned a seat at the table by refusing to play by the established rules. Sometimes that's what it takes.
