Fresha, the London-based booking platform for the beauty and wellness industry, has received 80 million dollars (about 73 million euros) from KKR's Next Generation Technology Growth fund - and with that has entered the unicorn club with a valuation above one billion dollars. It's not every day that an investor like KKR steps into a startup that offers booking a haircut.

And the numbers explain why. The platform has over 140,000 businesses through which over 35 million appointments are booked monthly across 120 countries. That's nearly a billion appointments a year - a figure that puts Fresha among the largest booking platforms in the world. Founded in 2015, the company has raised 285 million dollars in total so far.

This round isn't the seed round, nor a proof-of-concept round. It's a growth round - and that's not something KKR does at full price for a startup that's still trying. The money will go into geographic expansion and developing AI features, which is the standard answer package today for any business wanting to look modern to investors.

The question for the European scene is whether Fresha will stay in London or whether it will try to push more seriously into North America - where KKR finds most of its exits. For the beauty industry, whoever controls the booking platform also controls the information about who spends how much, when, and on what. That is no longer just booking appointments.