Analysis
GlossGenius, the scheduling-and-payments platform built for beauty and wellness businesses, announced it is rebranding as Genius AI alongside a $44 million Series D round that values the company at $1.15 billion. Lux Capital led the round, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Imaginary Ventures, L Catterton Growth, 2048 Ventures and StepStone Private Ventures all participating -- a mix of AI-focused and consumer-brand growth investors that signals how the company is positioning itself for its next chapter. The round brings Genius AI's total capital raised to more than $125 million since its 2016 founding.
The company was built by twin sisters Danielle and Leah Cohen-Shohet as GlossGenius, a vertical SaaS tool that let independent stylists, estheticians and small salon owners handle booking, payments, marketing and client management from a single app -- a category that also includes Squarespace's Acuity Scheduling, Vagaro and Boulevard. Genius AI says it now has 125,000 active businesses on the platform, annual revenue approaching $200 million, and $7 billion in payments facilitated annually, giving the new $1.15 billion mark a real, disclosed usage base rather than a pure growth-multiple bet.
The name change is the real story here: rather than staying a beauty-vertical tool, Genius AI is explicitly building agentic products meant to run end-to-end administrative workflows for any in-person service business -- fitness studios, home-services contractors, med-spas and beyond -- extending the same playbook that vertical SaaS winners like Toast and ServiceTitan used to expand out of a single niche. That makes Genius AI a direct example of the broader 2026 pattern of profitable, usage-rich vertical software companies re-platforming around agents rather than ceding the category to horizontal AI tools.
For operators in overlooked verticals, the read is straightforward: real revenue and daily-active usage in a boring-sounding niche can still command a unicorn multiple once an AI-agent layer is bolted on top, and investors are rewarding execution and retention over flashy model claims. What to watch: how fast Genius AI ships non-beauty verticals, whether incumbents like Squarespace or ServiceTitan respond by adding agentic features of their own, and whether the $1.15 billion mark holds up once the company reports its first full quarter under the new brand.
