500 Startups-backed beauty services marketplace gets more funding from Captii Ventures

Bfab co-founders Sergey Gaydar and Pawel Netreba.

Malaysia-based salon booking service Bfab tells Tech in Asia today it received a “six-figure USD” funding from existing investor Captii Ventures. Captii, 500 Startups, and KK Fund injected seed funding into the startup last year, prior to its launch.

Co-founder and CEO Pawel Netreba, a former Rocket Internet executive, says his team will use the money to further develop the product and grow its base of salons and beauty professionals – which now number 1,900 and 200, respectively. He shares that they’re working on something to better serve the needs of the merchants in the marketplace, but he’s keeping that under wraps for now. He also declines to reveal the terms of the follow-on funding.

Bfab, which stands for “be fabulous,” lets people book beauty services like a haircut or a massage in real time. Customers can schedule an appointment around the clock and receive instant confirmation. They can also compare prices offered across salons and rate the services afterwards.

“Our retention is phenomenal and ranges between 30 to 40 percent (reorder rate), supporting the thesis that customers book over and over again once they’ve tried booking via Bfab,” Pawel claims.

Pawel once led Foodpanda in Russia – a Rocket Internet-born online food delivery service. The German startup juggernaut is known for taking a proven business model, usually seen in mature markets, to new markets and growing it at an astonishing speed.

In this same fashion, Pawel and his co-founder Sergey Gaydar brought the concept of real-time salon booking from the US and Europe to Southeast Asia, where “there’s none or no serious players,” they say.

See: This guy used all he learned as a Rocket Internet exec to build his own startup