Mobile management startup Front Desk gets $4M, already processing $100M annually

Front Desk, a mobile management software startup targeting the $300 billion personal service industry, has received $4 million in funding.

Co-founder and CEO Jon Zimmerman, a Stanford graduate and early player at Expedia, launched the company in Seattle after watching the difficulty a friend had opening a CrossFit gym.

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“That’s how it started,” Zimmerman, 45, told VentureBeat. “I saw the pain points involved in growing a company.”

Front Desk’s SaaS system allows businesses like landscapers, dog walkers, doctors, and massage therapists, for example, to execute processes like payments, scheduling, and billing from their smartphones and tablets. According to Zimmerman, more than 1,000 clients are now on board.

Front Desk is now processing $100 million annually for small and medium-sized businesses since officially launching with a $3.2 million seed round last August. Investors then included Zillow co-founder Rich Barton and Second Avenue Partners.

Prior to the seed round, Zimmerman bootstrapped his startup.

Zimmerman, an industrial engineer who landed at Expedia in 1997 when it was still a development group at Microsoft, acknowledges competition in the remote management space, mainly from startup Mindbody, PayPal, and Square. But unlike those companies, Front Desk integrates all the necessary channels for mom-and-pops and larger companies to operate remotely, he said.

He pointed out that the remote applications his competition offers focus more on the payment processes and less on personnel management protocols. That, Zimmerman said, is what distinguishes Front Desk.

In sticking with Front Desk’s Seattle roots, most of the A round investors, including Barton of Zillow and Version One Ventures, are situated in the Pacific Northwest.