Squire Technologies

Market position

Squire positions itself as a full-scale, barbershop-specific management and POS system, and its Series C investor ICONIQ described it as an emerging leading operating system for barbershops. Forbes named it to its Next Billion-Dollar Startups list coverage in 2021, when it was valued at roughly 60 times that year's estimated sales. It competes with general and vertical scheduling/POS platforms including Barberly, Square for Barbershops, BLVD, Mangomint, Wellyx, Booksy, Vagaro, STX and EnvisionNow, differentiating on barbershop-specific workflows, depth of operational integration and international presence.

Rather than offering generic salon scheduling, Squire builds for the specific workflows of barbershops and men's salons — combining booking, POS, inventory, payroll, CRM and payments in one system — and supports everything from individual professionals to multi-location franchises across several countries.

Technology

An integrated software stack combining consumer-facing mobile booking and contactless card-on-file payments with back-office tools for barbershops: point of sale, scheduling, inventory management, payroll, CRM, marketing and customer engagement, together with barbershop discovery features that help shops market themselves. The consumer Android app has surpassed 100,000 downloads.

Go-to-market

Squire acquires shops through direct sales and marketing, scaled with capital from its 2020 and 2021 rounds, and drives consumer demand through its app-based barber discovery. Early customer acquisition relied on founder-led experimentation, including operating its own barbershop in Chelsea Market and demonstrating the product in pop-up barbershop setups. Fee waivers were used to attract shops during the pandemic. Celebrity and strategic investors including Stephen Curry, Trevor Noah, Quincy Jones, Pharrell Williams, Tooey Courtemanche, Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan back the company.

Independent barbers, stand-alone barbershops and multi-location barbershop and men's salon franchises — small and medium-sized businesses in the grooming industry — plus the consumers who book and pay for haircuts and shaves through the app.

Geography

Headquartered in New York City (115 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011), with an additional office in Buffalo, NY reported in 2020-2021. The platform is available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; company releases in 2020 and 2021 cited operations in 35 major cities across the US, Canada and the UK, and later 40 major markets across three continents.

History

Squire was founded in 2015 and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2016 batch. The founders' first concept — an "OpenTable for haircuts" — proved to solve a customer problem rather than a shop-owner problem, since most barbers were already fully booked. That led to a pivot toward vertically integrated small-business software for barbershops, positioned as a "QuickBooks for barbershops" with a services suite priced above $1,000 per month. To learn the operating side of the business, the team bought an existing barbershop in Manhattan's Chelsea Market for roughly $20,000 and used it as a test environment for product development. Angel seed funding, the Y Combinator batch and expansion into additional cities followed. Squire raised an $8 million Series A in January 2020 and a $27 million Series B in March 2020, days before COVID-19 shut down barbershops. The founders responded by temporarily eliminating subscription fees, maintaining headcount and continuing product investment. A $59 million Series C led by ICONIQ Capital followed in December 2020 and a $60 million Series D led by Tiger Global in July 2021, which tripled the valuation to $750 million.

Risks & controversies

The COVID-19 pandemic halted barbershop operations days after Squire closed its Series B in March 2020, eliminating the company's sole revenue source and prompting it to suspend subscription fees. Earlier, the founders were nearly defrauded of $5,000 by someone posing as an engineer while building the first prototype, and their initial booking-only product failed to achieve product-market fit with shop owners. The company's most recent stated valuation dates from July 2021.