What it means, how we got here, and a thank-you to the people who put us there.

Last month, Stripe recognized Aesthetic Record as one of their top processing platforms, an honor drawn from the more than 16,000 platforms running on Stripe around the world. We are deeply honored, slightly stunned, and mostly grateful. So before we say anything else, we want to say thank you.

This recognition belongs to the clinics, the front-desk teams, the injectors, the practice managers, and the medspa founders who chose us, and to every single person on the Aesthetic Record team who has spent the last several years quietly obsessed with making this industry better.

What does it mean to be a top Stripe processor?

Stripe powers the financial infrastructure for some of the most important companies in the world, from Shopify to Toast to OpenAI,  along with thousands of vertical software platforms in every industry imaginable. Being recognized by Stripe as one of their top processors is a signal that a platform has hit a rare combination of scale, growth, and product depth. Stripe doesn’t hand out this kind of recognition lightly.

Stripe themselves put it best at Sessions 2026, their annual conference: the platforms that earn this level of recognition are the ones “deeply embedded in their customers’ worlds” — the ones whose customers can’t imagine running their business any other way. That description hits especially close to home, because that’s exactly what we set out to build.

The growth story behind the list

Aesthetic Record started in 2017, when Dr. Justin Harper got tired of duct-taping disconnected tools together to run his growing medical spa practice. He had scaled from one clinic to ten locations across five states, and the systems just couldn’t keep up. So he built the platform he wished he’d had — one integrated home for medical records, booking, compliance, memberships, marketing, and payments.

From day one, payments was a core part of the story. Clinics were losing real money to spreadsheets, paper deposits, and clunky third-party processors. We launched with Stripe as our payments partner in 2019, and in 2025 we rolled out AR Pay — our fully integrated financial suite built on Stripe Connect, Stripe Terminal, the financing engine that powers AR Capital, and the Optimized Checkout Suite.

The numbers since then tell the story better than we can:

• More than $1 billion in annual payment volume processed on our platform
• Roughly 6,000 clinics running on Aesthetic Record
• 60% of clinics adopted AR Pay in its first year — doubling our payment processing in twelve months
• $14 million in payments recovered across 57,000 transactions in 2025 alone, thanks to Stripe’s adaptive acceptance, network tokens, and account updater
• $200+ million in total recovered revenue since 2019
• 7,000 active Stripe Terminal readers in clinics, accounting for 44% of payment volume
• 4% of revenue coming from BNPL — with 25% larger invoice sizes when patients use it
• $9 million in AR Capital loans delivered to clinics last year, with no fixed monthly payments

Payments now drive more than half of our revenue — not by replacing what we do, but by making the platform indispensable to the day-to-day operations of every clinic that runs on it.

Why this matters for the medical aesthetics industry

Medical aesthetics is one of the fastest-growing categories in healthcare, but it has historically been served by software that wasn’t built for it. Clinics were forced to choose between general-purpose EMRs, generic booking tools, and standalone payment processors that didn’t know anything about how a medspa actually operates.

Being recognized as a top Stripe processor is validation that a different model works — that a vertical platform, built with deep care for one specific industry, can stand alongside the most successful software businesses in the world. It’s proof that you don’t have to be a horizontal giant to do meaningful work. You just have to know your industry better than anyone else, and never stop building for it.

What this means for our practices, specifically

We want to be direct about this part, because it matters. This recognition isn’t a trophy we put on a shelf. It’s a signal, to you, to your patients, and to your bank, about the platform your business runs on. Here’s exactly what it means for the clinics that trust us:

• Your platform is stable, well-resourced, and growing. When you run your business on Aesthetic Record, you’re running it on infrastructure that has been independently validated by the most rigorous financial platform in the world. That stability protects your operation.
• Your patients’ payments run on the strongest rails available. The same authorization optimization that powers OpenAI, Shopify, and Toast runs every AR Pay transaction in your clinic. That’s why we recovered $14M in payments last year that would have otherwise been lost — money that went directly to clinics, not to chargebacks and failed cards.
• You get earlier access to what Stripe builds next. Being a top processor means we’re in the room when Stripe ships new capabilities — agentic checkout, smarter BNPL, embedded financing, new fraud protection. The features that hit the market first land in AR Pay first, which means they hit your clinic first.
• Your financing options keep getting better. We delivered $9M in AR Capital loans to clinics last year with no fixed monthly payments — repayment tied directly to your transactions. This recognition gives us deeper leverage to expand those programs and bring you more flexible capital, faster.
• Your tech stack tells a better story. When you talk to a lender, a landlord for a new location, a private-equity partner, or a buyer evaluating your practice — being built on a platform Stripe recognizes as one of their top processors is a quiet but real credibility signal. Your software is no longer just a back-office tool. It’s part of your business case.
• We will be here. The single biggest risk in vertical SaaS is the platform your business depends on going away. This level of recognition means we’re not a fragile startup — we’re a real, scaled business with real financial health and a real future. That’s peace of mind we never want any of our clinics to have to worry about again.

Translation: when you grow, we grow. When we grow, we have more resources to invest back into your clinic. That loop is exactly what this recognition is rewarding — and it’s exactly what we plan to accelerate.

To our clients and our team

“The level of support we get from Stripe has been phenomenal. Their guidance through major changes to our product, branding, and payments strategy has been a real driver of our growth. We wouldn’t be where we are today without Stripe.” — Tiphany Hall, PhD, Chief Growth Officer

We feel the same way about our practices. To the 9,000 plus practices who run their business on Aesthetic Record, from solo injectors just opening their first chair to enterprise groups managing dozens of locations,  thank you. You took a chance on us, you sent us feedback that made the product sharper, and you told your peers about us. That’s why this list has our name on it.

And to the Aesthetic Record team: every onboarding call, every support ticket, every late-night release, every design review, every “what if we tried this” moment is the reason we’re here. There is no recognition without you. We are so lucky to get to build this with you.

And we’re not done. Not even close.

If you’ve been on Aesthetic Record for a while, you already know we don’t stand still. This recognition isn’t a finish line, it’s permission to push harder. Here’s a preview of what we’re building next, all of which is shaped by the things our clinics tell us they need.

• Deeper AR Pay capabilities. Expanded BNPL through Affirm, Klarna, and Sunbit. Faster Instant Bank Payments. Smarter Tap to Pay and Text to Pay flows. Better in-clinic and online checkout experiences for every patient.
• More flexible financing for clinics. We’re expanding AR Capital, if you want to invest in a new room, new equipment, new marketing, we want capital to be the easiest part.
• Even tighter compliance and operations. Tools that help you stay ahead of state-by-state regulations, manage memberships at scale, and run multi-location practices without losing the personal touch that defines aesthetics.
• More patient-facing innovation. The Aesthetic Record patient experience is going to keep getting better, with cleaner check-in, smarter scheduling, and payment experiences that feel less like a transaction and more like part of the care.
• Continued partnership with Stripe at the deepest level. We have a roadmap with Stripe that goes well beyond what’s public today. As they build the financial infrastructure for the AI era, we’re building right alongside them — for medspas specifically.

If you’re already on Aesthetic Record, thank you. Keep sending us the feature requests, the bug reports, the wins, the questions. They are literally how we build.

If you’re not on AR yet, and you’re curious what it’s like to run your clinic on a platform Stripe recognizes as one of their top processors,  built by leaders who know medical aesthetics in and out, we would love to show you.

The first nine years built this milestone. The next nine are going to make it look small.

Here’s to what we build together.

Book a Demo Here 

Not Using AR Pay Yet? Learn More Here

Interested in a AR Capital Loan to help build your business? Click  Here to learn more. 

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