Engineering Manager - Platform

GlossGenius becomes Genius AI in 1.15 billion dollar round led by founders who once worked at Goldman Sachs. Editorial Team July 23, 2026 at 4:36 AM UTC Genius AI, the company formerly known as GlossGenius, has raised 44 million dollars in a Series D round led by Lux Capital, pushing its valuation to 1.15 billion dollars and marking the company's transition from a beauty and wellness scheduling tool into a broader AI platform for in person service businesses of every kind. The round included participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Imaginary Ventures, L Catterton Growth, 2048 Ventures, StepStone Private Ventures and existing investors, bringing the company's total funding to more than 125 million dollars since it launched in 2016. The rebrand from GlossGenius to Genius AI reflects the company's stated ambition to move beyond its original beauty and wellness roots into a platform serving the entire in person service economy. Founded by identical twins who left Goldman Sachs to build software. Genius AI was founded by identical twin sisters Danielle and Leah Cohen-Shohet, both Princeton graduates who finished their degrees summa cum laude before working as analysts at Goldman Sachs. Danielle, now chief executive, first spotted the problem the company was built to solve while working as a freelance makeup artist during her time at Princeton, watching salon owners and independent beauty professionals struggle with clunky, outdated scheduling and payments software. The sisters were freshmen at Princeton when their father was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a period that shaped their decision to eventually leave stable finance careers and build something of their own. Danielle taught herself to code while running her freelance makeup business on the side, eventually building the earliest version of what became GlossGenius from scratch. From beauty scheduling tool to full service economy platform. The platform now serves more than 125,000 service businesses across roughly half of all United States ZIP codes, having grown from a niche beauty industry tool into infrastructure used broadly across the in person service economy. According to the company, its platform has saved customers a combined 112 million hours of administrative work, and the business is now approaching a 200 million dollar annual revenue run rate, one of the stronger revenue foundations among AI first vertical software companies at this stage. The rebrand to Genius AI signals the company's intention to build agentic products capable of executing end to end work for service businesses across additional verticals beyond its original beauty and wellness focus, building on the operational and payments infrastructure it has spent nearly a decade refining for salon owners, independent stylists and other self care entrepreneurs. A notable milestone for female founders in tech. Genius AI's unicorn valuation places it among a relatively small group of female founded companies to reach billion dollar status, and its founders' path from Princeton and Goldman Sachs into building consumer facing software from the ground up has become a recurring reference point in discussions about non traditional routes into tech entrepreneurship. Leah Cohen-Shohet, who has held roles spanning go to market strategy and community leadership at companies including Symphony and Archipelago, brought operational and business development expertise that complemented Danielle's product and engineering focus. The company's early growth was notably bootstrapped, with the sisters prioritizing solid unit economics before raising outside venture capital in 2020, a sequencing that gave the business a stronger foundation heading into its more aggressive fundraising phase. What the new capital will support. With fresh funding in place, Genius AI plans to expand its customer base beyond its beauty and wellness core while developing new agentic products designed to handle more of the day to day operational work that small service businesses currently manage manually, from scheduling and payments to marketing and client communication. That expansion strategy mirrors a broader trend among vertical software companies that built deep expertise serving one industry niche before attempting to generalize that expertise into adjacent service categories, a strategy that carries real execution risk but also significant upside if the underlying operational patterns prove similar enough across different types of service businesses. Riding investor appetite for ai-first vertical software. Lux Capital's decision to lead the round reflects continued investor interest in AI native platforms built for underserved, operationally intensive industries rather than purely software native sectors that already have mature tooling. Genius AI's approaching 200 million dollar revenue run rate gives it a stronger fundamental basis than many recent AI unicorns that have reached billion dollar valuations without disclosing meaningful revenue, positioning the company as a relatively grounded bet within a funding environment that has increasingly rewarded pre-revenue AI startups on potential alone.

GlossGenius becomes Genius AI: inside the $1.15B bet on the physical economy. July 23, 2026 GlossGenius (Techstars 2015) has rebranded as Genius AI after raising a Series D at a $1.15B valuation, betting that AI will make human expertise more valuable, not less, in the in-person service economy. GlossGenius (Techstars 2015) just changed its name. Not because the beauty and wellness scheduling app people fell in love with was broken, but because it had outgrown what its old name could hold. This week, the company announced a Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation, pushing its total capital raised past $125 million. Alongside the raise, the company introduced a new corporate name, Genius AI, with GlossGenius continuing on as its flagship product. The rebrand isn't cosmetic. As co-founders Danielle Cohen-Shohet and Leah Cohen-Shohet explained in a note published the same day, the customer base has grown well beyond beauty and wellness, and the product has grown well beyond software. The new name reflects both. From back-office tool to "physical economy" AI. GlossGenius launched on a simple premise. Let service professionals focus on their craft instead of their back office. The founders bootstrapped the company for years, deliberately starting with an industry they saw as one of the most technologically underserved in America, beauty and wellness. Every hour a stylist or esthetician spent chasing no-shows, reconciling payments, or managing a calendar was an hour taken from clients. That focus has scaled. GlossGenius now says it powers more than 125,000 businesses across half of all U.S. ZIP codes, spanning salons, med spas, physical therapy practices, and wellness studios. The company estimates its platform has saved those businesses 112 million hours of administrative work and helped generate more than $2 billion in additional revenue, with the business itself approaching a $200 million revenue run rate this quarter. The bigger claim in the founders' note is about where AI is headed next. Their argument is that as models automate more knowledge work, in-person, human expertise, think the stylist, the physical therapist, the trainer, becomes more valuable, not less. They point to roughly 8 million U.S. businesses built around this kind of hands-on service work, representing more than $2 trillion in annual spend. Genius AI's bet is that this "physical economy" is entering its best era, and that the winning platform will be the one that runs the admin work autonomously rather than just helping with it. That shift is already visible in the product. Beyond its core scheduling, payments, and point-of-sale tools, GlossGenius has been rolling out AI agents, including a Growth Agent, a Marketing Agent, and a Reception tool that answers calls and texts around the clock, aimed at automating the busywork that surrounds every appointment rather than just recording it. The pitch, in one line. The announcement's headline captures the thesis the company is now built around. "Your genius is the craft. Let everything else run itself." It's a bet that the value of human expertise rises as AI takes over everything adjacent to it, and that GlossGenius, now under the Genius AI banner, wants to be the layer that disappears so the practitioner doesn't have to think about it.