Seattle startup vets launch new company to rethink marketing for spas and beauty brands – GeekWire

Former Petabyte executives are bringing their data expertise and tech chops to Rhodium, a new Seattle-area startup focused on helping medical spas and beauty brands interact with customers.

The company, which has raised $2 million in initial funding, aims to address what CEO Michael Hyman sees as a critical gap in the beauty and medical spa industry: leveraging data to improve customer experience and boost revenue.

“I look for places where there’s a lot of data and a lot of money and not a lot of companies making good use of the data to make money,” Hyman said.

Hyman previously led Petabyte, a Seattle-area startup that built software for veterinary clinics. Chewy acquired the company in 2022 for $43.4 million.

Petabyte co-founder Alex Krooglik, who also co-founded Embrace Pet Insurance, is chief operating officer at Rhodium.

Rhodium’s core offering is a software-as-a-service platform that uses machine learning and AI to help clinics and brands better understand and engage with customers — before, during, and after an appointment or purchasing a product. The platform ingests data from various sources — electronic medical records, Amazon, Shopify, Meta, Google, etc. — to automate marketing campaigns and customer touch-points.

In an unusual move for an early-stage software startup, Rhodium has merged with three direct-to-consumer beauty brands to create a unified company. The brands include Rootine, which makes drink powder blends for wellness; SiO Beauty, which makes skincare patches; and Solomomo, which makes a device to measure skin condition.

Rhodium plans to market its software to spas as well as direct-to-consumer beauty brands, using its portfolio of companies to “eat our own dog food,” as Hyman explained.

DTC brands face the same fundamental marketing challenges as medical spas, according to Hyman. They both need to grow their client base, take care of existing customers, and ultimately increase revenue. But they are not necessarily communicating with customers effectively, or using internal data to their advantage.

Hyman said Rhodium is using a number of AI apps to help speed up development.

“There are so many new tools out there and so many new techniques — it’s a great time to be in the tech space,” he said.

Rhodium competes with many other software companies targeting spas and wellness clinics, including Zenoti, another Seattle-area startup that is ranked No. 2 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top tech startups in the Pacific Northwest.

Before starting Petabyte, Hyman was an executive at Oath, the company created through the merger of AOL and Yahoo. He also worked at Amazon in the early 2000s, at Microsoft in the late 1990s, and held leadership roles at several startups. Hyman is also a city councilmember for the town of Yarrow Point, near Seattle.

Cindy Engstrom, founder of Solomomo, is chief marketing officer at Rhodium.

Rootine is led by Rachel Sanders, a former investment banking associate. SiO Beauty is led by Audrey Leibovich, a longtime marketing and merchandising leader.

Rhodium has about 25 employees. Relevance Ventures, a Nashville-based venture capital firm, invested in the company, as well as Loeb Ventures. Both firms previously invested in Petabyte.

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