Boulevard books $70M to help beauty and wellness salons with their bookings
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to getting ahold of an appointment for your hair or another treatment… that’s a different…

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to getting ahold of an appointment for your hair or another treatment… that’s a different story: the bespoke nature of a lot of the work has meant that a large swathe of the professionals providing these services have stayed offline when it comes to interfacing with customers.
But that is changing, and today, Boulevard — one of the wave of software companies that’s building a route to digitizing for hair salons, nail salons, barbershops, face and skin care service providers, and others in the world of beauty and wellness services, providing services for booking appointments, messaging clients, and taking payments — is announcing that it has raised $70 million in funding, a signal of changing demand and the traction this startup in particular is getting in the space.
The funding, a Series C, will be used to continue expanding Boulevard’s product and engineering teams, and to build out more tools targeting an ever-wider set of users in the bigger wellness and beauty sector (those product additions are typically big: it most recently added a whole new payments feature). This round is being led by Point72 Private Investments, with previous backers Toba Capital, Index Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, BoxGroup, and VMG Partners also participating.
It brings the total raised by the company to around $110 million (per Pitchbook data) since Boulevard was founded in February 2016; and while the startup is not disclosing its valuation, CEO and co-founder Matt Danna said in an interview that the figure has tripled since last summer — particularly notable, given the current pressures in the tech sector and overall financial markets.
To be clear, Boulevard faces a lot of competition — other big names include Zenoti, which at the end of 2020 was valued at over $1 billion; Booksy, which Pitchbook estimates was valued at just under $540 million in November 2021 after it, too, raised $70 million earlier that year; and Fresha, which was valued at over $640 million at the end of 2021, among many others.
But at the same time, Los Angeles-based Boulevard got this funding infusion at a boosted valuation because it has been on a roll. Focusing on the U.S. to date, the company said that it saw an 188% growth in annual recurring revenue compared to a year ago, with more than 25,000 individuals in 2,000 salons and spas in the country now using its platform. It’s also a massive market — and by Danna’s estimates, still with a lot of untapped business — with Boulevard quoting figures that forecast personal care and beauty sales passing $1.4 trillion, and the spa sector passing $150 billion, both by 2025.
The gap in the market that Boulevard is building to fill is that one-person bands, independent salons, and bigger chains all grapple with the same problem. Personal care is exactly that — personal and individualized — and therefore it’s been tricky for personal care specialists to use scheduling tools to organize it. Individual clients have differing requirements, treatments may take more or less time, and specialists are not robots whose time management can be predicted.
Image Credits: boulevard (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.
Danna and his co-founder Sean Stavropoulos (who is the CTO) previously worked together at Fullscreen respectively as head of product and head of engineering (they were early to that idea: Danna describes it as “creator tools for YouTube before YouTube built them itself”) and he said they came up with the idea for Boulevard out of a joke between them. “I was making fun of [Sean’s] hair and saying he needed it cut, and he was telling me he couldn’t find time to get on the phone for an appointment,” he said. They realized there was a lot of friction in the process that didn’t need to be there: why did they need to make a phone call in this day and age?
“We started obsessing about this,” Danna went on. They decided that this would be what they would tackle and build as a business.
Things then took a investigative, plainclothes turn. The pair posed as UCLA students doing research, Danna said, going from salon to salon asking questions about what worked and what did not with scheduling in their workplaces. They built a picture of why so much was still done offline. In short, it was about “yield optimization,” Danna said: specialists and their salons wanted to be perfectly booked up, and salons weren’t actually completely offline, either. Roughly half used some software on premises or in the cloud, but none of it did the trick both for the salons nor their customers.
Their solution was to give users more control over how to build and personalize appointment lengths for clients depending on specific treatments and specialists, and for each booking to in turn effect how the rest of the day’s schedule looked (not unlike Google Maps and the constraint solver used there to help estimate travel time for vehicle routing in a particular set of traffic conditions, Danna explained). In time, the plan will be also to help individual consumers (clients) build their own profiles that can be applied to any bookings they make with a particular salon, and maybe potentially elsewhere, too, marketplace style.
The rebound that Boulevard saw in the pandemic is another sign of the demand in the market, and perhaps a signal that its customers and the industry in general are more recession-proof than some might have assumed. Danna said that Boulevard’s business took an inevitable pause in the second quarter of 2020 as Covid-19 took hold, but “it was bouncing back within a quarter of that,” he said. Albeit that is with a different-shaped set of workers.
“Across all of the businesses we work with, they are doing 15% more revenues than pre-pandemic, although they are down 20% staff,” he said. “It was a big reshuffle.”
It will be interesting to see how and if that continues to play out as Boulevard eyes up international expansion. But for now, it’s a startup its investors believe is on solid footing in its home market.
“As the self-care industry continues to grow, so too will the role technology plays in creating the seamless experiences that keep clients coming back,” said Eddie Kang, a partner at Point72 Private investments, in a statement. “Not only has Boulevard designed an elegant and visionary platform that fills a pressing need in a fast-growing industry, but they’ve also built a thoughtful, customer-centric culture validated through world-class retention. We’re excited to support the Boulevard team as they continue to grow.” Kang is joining the board with this round.
recession pandemic covid-19 treatmentInternational
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19…

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19 vaccination weakens the immune system, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, according to a new study.
Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.
They pointed to experiments performed on mice that found multiple boosters on top of the initial COVID-19 vaccination “significantly decreased” protection against both the Delta and Omicron virus variants and testing that found a spike in IgG4 levels after repeat Pfizer vaccination, suggesting immune exhaustion.
Studies have detected higher levels of IgG4 in people who died with COVID-19 when compared to those who recovered and linked the levels with another known determinant of COVID-19-related mortality, the researchers also noted.
A review of the literature also showed that vaccines against HIV, malaria, and pertussis also induce the production of IgG4.
“In sum, COVID-19 epidemiological studies cited in our work plus the failure of HIV, Malaria, and Pertussis vaccines constitute irrefutable evidence demonstrating that an increase in IgG4 levels impairs immune responses,” Alberto Rubio Casillas, a researcher with the biology laboratory at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and one of the authors of the new paper, told The Epoch Times via email.
The paper was published by the journal Vaccines in May.
Pfizer and Moderna officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both companies utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in their vaccines.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology, said the paper illustrates why he’s been warning about the negative effects of repeated vaccination.
“I warned that more jabs can result in what’s called high zone tolerance, of which the switch to IgG4 is one of the mechanisms. And now we have data that clearly demonstrate that’s occurring in the case of this as well as some other vaccines,” Malone, who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Epoch Times.
“So it’s basically validating that this rush to administer and re-administer without having solid data to back those decisions was highly counterproductive and appears to have resulted in a cohort of people that are actually more susceptible to the disease.”
Possible Problems
The weakened immune systems brought about by repeated vaccination could lead to serious problems, including cancer, the researchers said.
Read more here...
Spread & Containment
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Banned By Major Social Media Site, Campaign Pages Blocked
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Banned By Major Social Media Site, Campaign Pages Blocked
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Twitter…

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Twitter owner Elon Musk invited Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a discussion on his Twitter Spaces after Kennedy said his campaign was suspended by Meta-owned Instagram.
“Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening?” he wrote on Twitter.
An accompanying image shows that Instagram said it “suspended” his “Team Kennedy” account and that there “are 180 days remaining to disagree” with the company’s decision.
In response to his post, Musk wrote: “Would you like to do a Spaces discussion with me next week?” Kennedy agreed, saying he would do it Monday at 2 p.m. ET.
Hours later, Kennedy wrote that Instagram “still hasn’t reinstated my account, which was banned years ago with more than 900k followers.” He argued that “to silence a major political candidate is profoundly undemocratic.”
“Social media is the modern equivalent of the town square,” the candidate, who is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, wrote. “How can democracy function if only some candidates have access to it?”
The Epoch Times approached Instagram for comment.
Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening? pic.twitter.com/0G8oRnoXTv
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 2, 2023
It’s not the first time that either Facebook or Instagram has taken action against Kennedy. In 2021, Instagram banned him from posting claims about vaccine safety and COVID-19.
After he was banned by the platform, Kennedy said that his Instagram posts raised legitimate concerns about vaccines and were backed by research. His account was banned just days after Facebook and Instagram announced they would block the spread of what they described as misinformation about vaccines, including research saying the shots cause autism, are dangerous, or are ineffective.
“This kind of censorship is counterproductive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply,” he said at the time.
Read more here...
International
Study Falsely Linking Hydroxychloroquine To Increased Deaths Frequently Cited Even After Retraction
Study Falsely Linking Hydroxychloroquine To Increased Deaths Frequently Cited Even After Retraction
Authored by Jessie Zhang via Thje Epoch…

Authored by Jessie Zhang via Thje Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An Australian and Swedish investigation has found that among the hundreds of COVID-19 research papers that have been withdrawn, a retracted study linking the drug hydroxychloroquine to increased mortality was the most cited paper.
With 1,360 citations at the time of data extraction, researchers in the field were still referring to the paper “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis” long after it was retracted.
Authors of the analysis involving the University of Wollongong, Linköping University, and Western Sydney Local Health District wrote (pdf) that “most researchers who cite retracted research do not identify that the paper is retracted, even when submitting long after the paper has been withdrawn.”
“This has serious implications for the reliability of published research and the academic literature, which need to be addressed,” they said.
“Retraction is the final safeguard against academic error and misconduct, and thus a cornerstone of the entire process of knowledge generation.”
Scientists Question Findings
Over 100 medical professionals wrote an open letter, raising ten major issues with the paper.
These included the fact that there was “no ethics review” and “unusually small reported variances in baseline variables, interventions and outcomes,” as well as “no mention of the countries or hospitals that contributed to the data source and no acknowledgments to their contributions.”

Other concerns were that the average daily doses of hydroxychloroquine were higher than the FDA-recommended amounts, which would present skewed results.
They also found that the data that was reportedly from Australian patients did not seem to match data from the Australian government.
Eventually, the study led the World Health Organization to temporarily suspend the trial of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 patients and to the UK regulatory body, MHRA, requesting the temporary pause of recruitment into all hydroxychloroquine trials in the UK.
France also changed its national recommendation of the drug in COVID-19 treatments and halted all trials.
Currently, a total of 337 research papers on COVID-19 have been retracted, according to Retraction Watch.
Further retractions are expected as the investigation of proceeds.
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