Doing laundry is usually a chore. It takes time and is tedious. Few of us love to do it.
So it’s no shock that startups have emerged to take that load off your again — actually. And traders are lining as much as fund new and older gamers alike.
Eleven-month-old NoScrubs has simply raised $2 million in a pre-seed spherical led by Initialized Capital for its on-demand laundry supply service. And in late February, Rinse raised a $23 million Sequence D led by LG Electronics to proceed rising its 12-year-old enterprise, which incorporates dry cleansing providers.
Whereas they’ve totally different enterprise fashions, the 2 firms are the newest examples of laundry startups attracting enterprise capital. And so they’re hoping to achieve an area that has seen different startups wash up.
Early Instacart worker Matt O’Connor, CEO of NoScrubs, and Sudhanshu Gautam, CTO, (pictured above) based the startup practically a 12 months in the past with the intent of constructing a sooner, extra reasonably priced laundry service. The corporate claims it could return folded hundreds inside just a few hours from pickup. Clients can both pay on demand or join a subscription.
To date, NoScrubs is just accessible in its house base of Austin, the place it’s approaching 1,000 distinctive prospects, O’Connor tells TechCrunch completely. (I used the service briefly in 2024 when our house renovation resulted in a lack of entry to our washer and dryer.)
Rinse, which touts itself because the “Uber of laundry,” was based by CEO Ajay Prakash, CTO Sam Cheng, and James Joun in 2013. It has raised over $70 million since inception.
San Francisco-based Rinse presently operates in a number of main U.S. cities. It pledges to show round laundry or dry cleansing inside as little as 24 hours (for an additional price) however has a normal three- to four-day turnaround. It prides itself on hiring its employees as workers reasonably than making them unbiased contractors.
NoScrubs
The thought for NoScrubs was born whereas O’Connor was head of geographic enlargement at Instacart as certainly one of its first 20 workers. He turned pissed off along with his laundry service, which he felt was too costly and gradual.
NoScrubs believes the pace at which it’s capable of flip round its providers offers it an edge. It has designated what O’Connor describes as strategic areas unfold all through Austin in order that the space traveled after the time of pickup is minimized. These areas are a mix of what he described as “vetted laundromat companions and customary laundry rooms in condo complexes.
The corporate plans to increase inside Texas and “throughout many of the U.S.” he says by the top of 2026. Presently, NoScrubs has 13 workers.
Rinse
The thought for Rinse got here whereas Prakash and Joun, two former Dartmouth classmates, and Cheng launched into a mission to show this chore right into a tech-enabled service.
Prakash’s background was in startups and Joun’s mother and father had spent greater than twenty years working a brick-and-mortar dry cleaner in South San Francisco. They piloted the idea with associates earlier than bootstrapping the enterprise.
Since these early days, Rinse says it has cleaned greater than 100 million clothes. Whereas it operates primarily a direct-to-consumer mannequin, it’s now additionally rising the B2B aspect of its enterprise, the place it serves business purchasers comparable to multifamily operators, cafes, and spas.
Trying forward, Prakash says Rinse’s subsequent step is to accumulate and model brick-and-mortar laundromats and cleaners. It additionally intends to proceed to increase geographically.
At the moment, it employs about 600 valets and about 100 non-valet employees.
Like NoScrubs, it provides a subscription service in addition to a higher-priced pay-as-you-go possibility.
Traders
Initialized Companion Zoe Perret believes that NoScrubs stands out due to its mannequin of leveraging underutilized machines in laundromats and condo complexes reasonably than proudly owning its personal infrastructure.
“Even this quickly after launch, preliminary traction of their first market reveals a transparent path towards scalability whereas sustaining robust unit economics,” she stated. “As they proceed to show this enterprise mannequin works, they’ll plug and play to increase into new geos at scale.”
Frontier Enterprise Capital joined Initialized in backing NoScrubs’ pre-seed spherical.
In the meantime, LG helps promote its funding by providing Rinse’s providers to purchasers of its washer and dryers. Contemplating that the U.S. laundry services and dry-cleaning providers market measurement was estimated at $15.75 billion in 2024, it’s clear that this can be a huge business with room for a number of gamers. Not all firms within the area have fared effectively, although. In 2016, Washio shut down its operations, which Rinse scooped up. And in 2014, Y Combinator-backed door-to-door laundry service Prim introduced it was shutting down.
