Massage on-demand business Zeel is hoping to grow its presence in New York and San Francisco through buying MassageNow from Locality.
MassageNow, founded in 2014, partners with high-end spas to fulfill last-minute spa massage appointments. Zeel’s mobile app service — available in 33 U.S. cities — includes on-demand massages from licensed therapists that come to customers’ homes, hotels, workplaces or events between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Zeel plans to transition MassageNow customers to its at-home service, instead of continuing to offer last-minute spa appointments, according to Zeel chief executive officer Samer Hamadeh. Aside from acquiring new customers, the deal also gives Zeel relationships with 50 spas in New York and San Francisco, which will be added to its Zeel Spa software offering. That service allows spas to book massage therapists to work at their locations. “The problem is that customers are always calling last minute, and [spas] don’t have therapists to fulfill the orders,” Hamadeh said.
Hamadeh founded the company in December 2012 after spotting an opening when he was processing massage requests in an earlier version of Zeel. “We noticed that 55 percent of all customers wanted a massage within four hours,” he said.
Several years later, Zeel is fresh off a $10 million Series A venture capital round led by Emil Capital Partners. Aside from the acquisition, the business plans to expand to Santa Barbara, Calif., Thursday, and Pittsburgh, Pa., in July, Hamadeh said, with international expansion on the horizon for 2017.
While Hamadeh declined to provide sales insights, he said that the app now boasts more than 6,000 registered massage therapists, and provided more than 200,000 massages from its launch in December 2012 to the end of 2015. This year, it expects to handle more than 200,000 massages, Hamadeh said.