Doing laundry can be a chore. It takes time and is tedious. Few of us like to do it.
So it’s no surprise that startups have emerged to take that load off your back — literally. And investors are lining up to fund new and older players alike.
Eleven-month-old NoScrubs has just raised $2 million in a pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital for its on-demand laundry delivery service. And in late February, Rinse raised a $23 million Series D led by LG Electronics to continue growing its 12-year-old business, which includes dry cleaning services.
While they have different business models, the two companies are the latest examples of laundry startups attracting venture capital. And they’re hoping to succeed in a space that has seen other startups wash up.
Early Instacart employee Matt O’Connor, CEO of NoScrubs, and Sudhanshu Gautam, CTO, (pictured above) founded the startup nearly a year ago with the intent of building a faster, more affordable laundry service. The company claims it can return folded loads within a few hours from pickup. Customers can either pay on demand or sign up for a subscription.
So far, NoScrubs is only available in its home base of Austin, where it’s approaching 1,000 unique customers, O’Connor tells News exclusively. (I used the service briefly in 2024 when our home renovation resulted in a loss of access to our washer and dryer.)
Rinse, which touts itself as the “Uber of laundry,” was founded by CEO Ajay Prakash, CTO Sam Cheng, and James Joun in 2013. It has raised over $70 million since inception.
San Francisco-based Rinse currently operates in several major U.S. cities. It pledges to turn around laundry or dry cleaning within as little as 24 hours (for an extra fee) but has a standard three- to four-day turnaround. It prides itself on hiring its workers as employees rather than making them independent contractors.
NoScrubs
The idea for NoScrubs was born while O’Connor was head of geographic expansion at Instacart as one of its first 20 employees. He became frustrated with his laundry service, which he felt was too expensive and slow.
NoScrubs believes the speed at which it’s able to turn around its services gives it an edge. It has designated what O’Connor describes as strategic locations spread throughout Austin so that the distance traveled after the time of pickup is minimized. Those locations are a combination of what he described as “vetted laundromat partners and common laundry rooms in apartment complexes.
The company plans to expand within Texas and “across most of the U.S.” he says by the end of 2026. Presently, NoScrubs has 13 employees.
Rinse
The idea for Rinse came while Prakash and Joun, two former Dartmouth classmates, and Cheng embarked on a mission to turn this chore into a tech-enabled service.
Prakash’s background was in startups and Joun’s parents had spent more than two decades operating a brick-and-mortar dry cleaner in South San Francisco. They piloted the concept with friends before bootstrapping the business.
Since those early days, Rinse says it has cleaned more than 100 million garments. While it operates primarily a direct-to-consumer model, it is now also growing the B2B side of its business, where it serves commercial clients such as multifamily operators, cafes, and spas.
Looking ahead, Prakash says Rinse’s next step is to acquire and brand brick-and-mortar laundromats and cleaners. It also intends to continue to expand geographically.
Today, it employs about 600 valets and about 100 non-valet workers.
Like NoScrubs, it offers a subscription service as well as a higher-priced pay-as-you-go option.
Investors
Initialized Partner Zoe Perret believes that NoScrubs stands out because of its model of leveraging underutilized machines in laundromats and apartment complexes rather than owning its own infrastructure.
“Even this soon after launch, initial traction in their first market shows a clear path toward scalability while maintaining strong unit economics,” she said. “As they continue to prove this business model works, they can plug and play to expand into new geos at scale.”
Frontier Venture Capital joined Initialized in backing NoScrubs’ pre-seed round.
Meanwhile, LG is helping promote its investment by offering Rinse’s services to purchasers of its washer and dryers. Considering that the U.S. laundry facilities and dry-cleaning services market size was estimated at $15.75 billion in 2024, it’s clear that this is a massive industry with room for multiple players. Not all companies in the space have fared well, though. In 2016, Washio shut down its operations, which Rinse scooped up. And in 2014, Y Combinator-backed door-to-door laundry service Prim announced it was shutting down.
