Salon software Mangomint raises $13M as it booms in post-COVID labor shortage

You need to read your credit card information on the phone to make a massage appointment. It makes you wonder how safe it is to give your personal information to someone. Mangomint built a tool that streamlines the booking experience for the beauty industry, which includes everything from spas and massage parlors to piercings and tattoo studios.

In Canada and the U.S., Mangomint has surpassed 200,000 monthly appointments, spurred by user growth during the Pandemic. The $13 million Series A round was led by Open View Venture Partners and was joined by startup300 and existing angels.

There is a post-COVID labor shortage in developed economies. Businesses that require in-person worker attendance, like restaurants and beauty salon, have been struggling to retain staff, many of whom have quit to deal with chronic sickness, look for higher-paid jobs, or seek better work-life balance.

Cost of labor is going up and supply is going down due to people quitting. These jobs are being automated.

Lang created Mangomint after selling his software development company. In the US, there were spas and salon no matter where we went. Lang said that they had to call to book a lot of appointments.

Lang described the current iteration of Mangomint as an operating system for salon and spas that automate booking, point-of-sale, employee payrolls, and customer relationship management. Lang said that the intention isn't to remove humans, but to enhance human work, a mission that has become common for a lot of workplace automation software.

At Mangomint, you will never see the word Artificial Intelligence.

There are certain human functions that can't be carried out byrobots. Many customers want advice from a salon on the type of service they receive, so Mangomint leaves that part of the interaction on the phone. After the call, its software automatically sends a text message to the customers, who will then click on a booking link to submit their credit card information, which can be auto- filled if they have it stored on their phones.

Overhead costs for businesses can be reduced by removing some of the most menial work. The truth is that most of this type of software is just tools that replace spreadsheets.

There is a graveyard of startups that try to be the Opentable for the beauty industry.

Lang wanted to know why he would use this platform if he had a trusted salon expert. The mangomint is trying to stay in the foreground. Users don't need to create a MangoMint account to make appointments. By integrating its software into the day to day operations of small businesses, it hopes to be invisible.

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