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Fresha, the beauty and wellness platform originally founded in the UAE in 2015 before relocating to London, has reached unicorn status after raising $80 million from KKR at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, bringing total capital raised to $285 million. The company says it is already profitable.
Founded by William Zeqiri and Nicholas Miller, Fresha provides booking, payments, point-of-sale, marketing and business management tools to over 130,000 beauty and wellness businesses across 120 countries, facilitating more than 35 million appointments per month and over $15 billion in annual GMV.
The platform is subscription-free, monetising instead through payments processing, first-time bookings and marketing services. KKR's Patrick Devine said Fresha had built "a differentiated platform combining software, financial services, and marketplace capabilities with embedded AI" that is "deeply integrated into daily operations" of its customers.
The GCC remains one of Fresha's strongest markets alongside the UK and Australasia.
UAE-based MEVP was Fresha's first institutional investor at seed in 2015 and led its $6 million Series A in 2017, before taking two partial exits. MEVP's first secondary sale during the $100 million Series C led by General Atlantic in June 2021 generated a 39x cash-on-cash multiple and an 88% IRR, according to the firm's public statements at the time.
A second partial exit six months later during the $52.5 million Series C extension, co-led by Michael Lahyani and Dubai's BECO Capital at a $640 million valuation, generated a 52x multiple and over 90% IRR, according to MEVP. MEVP said it retained a sizable stake after both exits.
BECO had earlier participated in the $20 million Series B in 2019 led by Partech, and took its own partial exit from Fresha in 2025 according to an end of year LinkedIn post, contributing to $36 million in distributions BECO made to its LPs that year across Fresha, Syarah and CoinMENA. BECO's own website describes Fresha as "one of the region's clearest examples of building a global business from the Gulf."
The KKR round, made through the firm's Next Generation Technology Growth strategy, will fund global expansion and AI development. Fresha has grown from 60,000 businesses at the time of its Series C extension to over 130,000 today, more than doubling its footprint while reaching profitability, a trajectory that contrasts with many venture-backed vertical SaaS companies that have struggled to find sustainable unit economics at scale.
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