BookFresh grabs seed investment

San Mateo, Ca.-based startup raises $500K from angel investors including Ron Conway

Bookfresh, a startup offering online appointment scheduling technology for small businesses, has raised $500K in seed funding from angel investors.  Among these investors is Ron Conway, who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Digg.

Although Conway has recently stated he is looking into real-time search, as a focus in his upcoming investments, he explained, “I believe in the team and product behind BookFresh and am excited to be involved with their business.”  BookFresh offers a fresh approach to the sector of scheduling online appointments.  

The service aims to bring the tedious process of booking appointments with doctors, dentists, hair salons and other small businesses, which are regularly done through phone calls, to be Web enabled.  

Although similar in overall concept to companies like Appointment-Plus, BookFresh differentiates itself by embracing the Web 2.0.  The San Mateo, Ca., based startup offers an API small business can incorporate into their own sites instead of being stuck using at a single site to provide its appointment scheduling.  Ryan Donahue, CEO of BookFresh admitted this feature was what sparked investments explaining, “Due to strong growth and overwhelming partnership interest in our new APIs, we are excited to take on a modest amount of additional venture capital.”

Up until last month, BookFresh was formerly known as HourTown.  It initially raised $1 million in funding from NBC Universal, Baseline Ventures and Hatch Ventures last August.

The company’s new pricing structure ranges from Free, which is very limited, to Business Pro, which costs $29.95/ month, but offers pretty much unlimited features including bookings, widgets, SMS/text notifications and plenty more you can check out here.

The company said it will use the funding to help support its rapidly growing business.  

Here's what somebody interacting with BookFresh's platform would see at the start -