About five years ago, we met a company with a product called SpaFinder. The company had a promising technology that addressed a big challenge that no one else was tackling – moving the sale of services from offline to online. At the time, the ability to buy products online was exploding, but booking services online was still few and far between. We knew they were on to something big, so we worked closely with them to recapitalize, spin it out and launch of the new company (then named GramercyOne) in 2011.

Fast forward to today – the company is now more appropriately named Booker, and the category has matured significantly.So it was no surprise to us – but nevertheless a major milestone when earlier this week, Booker closed a $35 million round of funding led by financial investor Medina Capital and strategic investor, First Data, the largest payments processing company. There was additional participation from existing investors Revolution Ventures, Jump Capital, Signal Peak Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Grotech Ventures, and TDF Ventures.

Over the past four years, Booker has grown into an all-in-one local service commerce platform that enables SMB owners to build their customer bases, book appointments, process payments, manage employees, and create client relationships. In  2014, the company generated an impressive transaction volume in excess of $2 billion. The company has moved beyond just selling services online and now manages the complete customer transaction for its SMB partners.  Booker allows small businesses to migrate to the online economy through tools that historically have been limited to large companies with large IT budgets.

Booker plans to use this funding to expand the number of business categories it serves and to enhance its product offering to drive revenue further for its merchants.

We could not be more excited for the Booker team as they continue to change the way consumers and businesses book and manage services online!