Greater Washington barbershop booking platform theCut raised $4.5 million in seed funding, the company announced Friday.
The round — which brings its funding to $5.35 million to date — was led by Baltimore's NextGen Venture Partners, with additional investments by Elevate Ventures of Indianapolis, Singh Capital of Potomac and Leadout Capital of Palo Alto, California. Leadout Managing Partner Ali Rosenthal was named to theCut's board of directors.
The app, launched in 2016, allows barbers to market their services and customers to search for local barbershops, book appointments and pay for cuts. TheCut, which has office space in Tysons, has more than 10,000 barbers actively using the platform, with around 1.5 million bookings monthly, according to a press release. The company said those bookings brought in more than $500 million in revenue for its barbers, but declined to disclose company revenue.
CEO Obi Omile Jr., who co-founded theCut with Chief Technology Officer Kush Patel, said the new funding will allow the company to build up its team, which now sits at 20 employees, including interns.
"On the engineering side, we’re looking for talented Android and backend engineers to help us build a new product we’re working on. And on the business side, we’re building out a top-tier marketing team to help us reach more people and barbers across the country and overseas," Omile said in an email.
Omile said raising money during the pandemic was, "an interesting experience. On the one hand, investors were initially more reserved with capital. But as their perspectives shifted to longer-term views, they became much more opportunistic.
"We didn’t raise in the height of the pandemic, more at the tail end before the Delta surge," he said. "Which meant we didn’t have to compete with many of the companies who were building solutions to aid in fighting the pandemic. Investors still had the capital to deploy but the number of viable 'pandemic-proof' companies were in short supply. So companies like ours, that were able to weather the shock of the pandemic, were much more attractive to VCs."
