Hair and beauty salons have the potential to be highly profitable businesses. The business model revolves around selling affordable beauty services to a loyal customer base that frequently demands them. Once a salon owner acquires recurring customers, their business will see recurring revenue streams. That is how successful salons grow and prosper.
However, traditional banks and financial institutions have historically labeled salons as high-risk businesses. Lenders feel that salons rely too much on the talent of the staff in order to be successful, so banks are hesitant to lend money to them. It doesn’t even matter if a salon has a loyal customer base with steady income. The high-risk label will remain on the business in the eyes of the lenders.
AI-Driven Finance Product to Help Salon Owners Access Funding
Barespace, a fast-growing software company known for its AI-powered operating system, is giving new hope to existing hair and beauty salon owners in their pursuit of growth funding. The company recently announced the official launch of its new embedded financial product called Barespace Capital, which will allow salon owners to access vital growth funding directly through an AI-driven platform.
Since the founding of Barespace in 2022, the company has been a booking platform specifically built for hair and beauty service providers. It manages all the essential functions of a salon business, such as team management, inventory management, booking, scheduling, payments, point of sale, and analytical reporting. By unifying back-office, front-desk, and mobile workflows into one AI-driven platform, Barespace offers salons a scalable foundation to grow and prosper in the competitive beauty industry.
Barespace Capital is designed to eliminate traditional barriers that have prevented salon owners from accessing growth funding. When salon owners integrate their operations into Barespace’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, the AI-driven system will have direct insight into the salon’s level of success. After all, Barespace already manages the live booking, inventory, and payments of the salons that have signed up with them. That gives Barespace access to all the critical sales and financial data of those salons in order to judge their level of success.
Traditional lenders cannot properly assess a salon’s true financial risk because they rely too much on historical income statements that may no longer be relevant. These retrospective financials don’t indicate the real-time success or failure of a salon. Only a system that directly manages the real-time payments and financials of a salon will know its true potential.
As a result, Barespace Capital can do a much better job than a traditional bank of judging a salon’s creditworthiness and financial risk. Seeing how many salons have volatile cash flow, a lender must have firsthand insight into a salon’s financials to determine if they have a track record of recurring income. It is the only way to know for sure that they will be a low-risk investment.
“Traditional banks don’t understand the business, and most salon owners either go without or jump through hoops for a loan that can take months to approve,” according to Conor Moules, co-founder and CEO of Barespace. “Barespace Capital changes that. Because we already live inside the salon, managing bookings, product inventory, staff, and payments, we have a real-time picture of the business that no bank ever sees. When you can see the talent and the traction in real time, backing them is not a risk. It’s obvious.”
What to Expect
Salon owners seeking funding from Barespace Capital will know their eligibility for funding within 48 hours. They are not required to fill out a separate bank or loan application because the entire eligibility assessment goes through the Barespace AI-driven operating system.
Eligible salon businesses can secure funding in an amount ranging from €2,000 up to €2 million directly through the Barespace platform. Once approved for funding, the owner makes weekly payments based on a percentage of their salon’s weekly card machine revenue rather than fixed monthly installments.
For example, if a salon has a slow week with low recurring income, the owner can make smaller payments toward the loan. On the other hand, if a salon has a good week with high revenue generation, the repayment amount for the week goes up. That way, the salon owner is not stuck with fixed monthly loan payments that they might not be able to afford if they have low cash flow.
The revenue-based repayment model is a lifesaver for salons because it will allow them to survive temporary times of low cash flow in order to save their businesses. Then, once those businesses prosper again, they can repay the loan with interest to satisfy the lenders. Everyone wins in this scenario.
About Barespace
Barespace has only been around for four years, and yet, it currently works with over 300 salons throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France. Recent reports indicate it has already received additional funding to expand to even more countries throughout Europe. The total funding raised to date is around €4.68 million, which includes the €2.9 million in seed funding acquired in September 2025.
Some of the biggest investors in Barespace have included Elkstone Ventures, Dogpatch Labs, and Enterprise Ireland. Many reputable angel investors have also contributed to this incredible venture, including CEO Barry Napier of Cubic Telecom, Rick Kelly (previously from Meta Ireland), Tom Kennedy (co-founder of Hostelworld, and Brian Caulfield (formerly with Molten Ventures).
The real-world impact of the company is already apparent, starting with the first salon owner to go live on the Barespace platform. Katrina Kelly, the founder of Darlo Hair Salon in Dublin, was one of Barespace’s first customers. She used Barespace Capital to secure funding to launch her consumer hair product, Darlo Bounce. Shortly afterward, the product had already sold out three times. Kelly then secured even more funding throughout the platform within 48 hours to expand the manufacturing of her product further.
Barespace Capital is the latest advancement of the company and its agenda in becoming the top booking platform in the beauty industry. It supports multi-currency transactions and multi-location deployments to support salons in many countries throughout Europe.
