Vertical SaaS has reshaped how restaurants, salons, and gyms run their businesses, but one major everyday service sector has remained almost entirely without modern software infrastructure. The U.S. laundry industry encompasses over 90,000 retail locations with laundromats, dry cleaners, and tailors, plus hundreds of thousands of shared laundry rooms in multi-family housing, yet most operators still manage orders, payments, and customer data through fragmented, outdated systems that leave them with little visibility into their own businesses. Cents built the first fully integrated software, hardware, and payments platform designed exclusively for laundry and garment care operators, giving owners a single system to manage point-of-sale, machine payments, pickup and delivery, AI-powered customer service, and dynamic pricing. The platform now serves more than 4,500 locations processing $1B in payments annually and maintains 99% customer retention, a figure that signals deep operator dependency rather than just adoption. With its AI-native toolset extending features like automated marketing and business intelligence to small business owners who could never access them before, Cents has established itself as the operating system of record for one of America’s most enduring and underserved small business verticals.
AlleyWatch sat down with Cents Cofounder and CEO Alex Jekowsky to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?We just closed a $140M Series C round led by Sumeru Equity Partners, with continued investment from Camber Creek, who led our Series B. This is the largest single tech investment ever made in the laundry vertical, and it’s a signal to the market that this space is serious.
Tell us about the product or service that Cents offers.
Cents is the only fully integrated software, hardware, and payments platform built specifically for the laundry industry. We give laundromat owners, dry cleaners, and multi-family operators everything they need to run and grow their businesses: point-of-sale systems, on-machine payments, marketing automation, AI-powered customer service, pickup and delivery management, dynamic pricing, and business intelligence.
What inspired the start of Cents?
I left college my Sophomore year to start my first company, which was acquired in 2019 when I was 23. I hadn’t worked in a corporate job before and knew that, while I was an employee, I’d want to keep scraping the entrepreneurial itch. I thought becoming a small business owner would be the perfect solution. I had looked at several opportunities in the hospitality space, but once I had learned about the laundry industry, I was hooked. I joined the Coin Laundry Association, attended events, met other investors and business owners, and I knew this was the space for me. However, the deeper I got into the industry, the more shocked I was to find that there were no sophisticated, centralized software and payment systems that would enable me to run stores efficiently. That’s when the idea for Cents was born!
How is Cents different?
Beyond our product, team, investor base, and market penetration, it’s really our approach. We are the only company that has made a full, committed bet on this space across software, hardware, and payments, all under one roof. Other point solutions address one piece of the puzzle and do not have the resources to invest in the kind of customer success and support that SMBs need. Cents addresses all of it. Starting a laundromat is easy; scaling it is hard. That’s where payments, specialized hardware, POS, and self-service infrastructure matter. We also bring AI-native tools — dynamic pricing, business intelligence, and automated marketing — that were previously out of reach for small business owners in this space.
What market does Cents target and how big is it?
We’re focused on the entire laundry and garment care industry — supporting over 90,000 retail laundry businesses (laundromats, dry cleaners, tailors, cobblers, etc.) and hundreds of thousands of laundry rooms in multi-family communities across the U.S. It’s one of the last major Main Street verticals with almost no modern technology infrastructure, which makes it one of the most compelling opportunities in vertical SaaS. The laundry services industry is an essential everyday service, and it’s well poised for technological transformation.
What’s your business model?
Cents operates on a modular SaaS subscription model, meaning operators can start with the tools they need and add on as they grow. Core products like the POS and Business Manager, on-machine payment systems, AI-powered phone systems, online order and delivery management, websites, and marketing tools are each priced as monthly subscriptions, with hardware bundles sold separately. Our SaaS and hardware products also power payments for our customers, and we monetize digital and physical card transactions processed through our rails. Our model is designed to grow with the operator, based on their unique business needs and growth. As they expand, so do we.
How has the business changed since we last spoke in 2024 after your Series B round?
Our mission and goals have stayed the same since we started the business back in 2021. What’s changed for us is the scale at which we’ve been able to support our customers and the breadth of products that our customers now have access to. We knew that hardware would be a critical gateway to drive impact and value to our customers. Beyond hardware, we’ve been able to deliver value in such broader ways to our customers, which has been a flywheel for our success.
What was the funding process like?
It was a very competitive process, and we were fortunate to have so many great firms passionate about our market opportunity, product, and team. As with any round, we focused our evaluation on the group we felt would deliver the most authentic, genuine, and value-driven impact and who truly took the time to understand the needs, complexities, and unique dynamics of our market. Sumeru became the obvious choice for us, and I could not be more excited to be partnering with Sanjeet, Chris, Nate, and the entire Sumeru team.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
In the early days, investors were concerned with TAM, did not believe in the benefits and importance of our hardware play, and questioned our ICO’s desire to invest in technology. This type of thinking is a reason why our industry has been overlooked by technology for decades. I’ve been so passionate about this industry that I’ve never wanted to feel like I had to ‘sell’ or convince someone that this industry was worth betting big on. However, I do believe that a big part of our job has been to help investors see what we see: that these operators are sophisticated and looking for a technology partner, the market is huge and underpenetrated, and that Cents has already established a dominant position as the leader in the industry. It didn’t hurt that we have 99% customer retention, too!
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Investors have seen this playbook before in other industries, but the dynamics of this industry were so unique that they realized that something special could be done. Every one of our investors knows that our DNA as a company is to take an operator-first mindset and operate in a product-led growth strategy. Our earliest investors were excited to take a big bet with us on investing heavily, in a way never done before, to build a category-defining software and hardware product suite. The combination of defensible technology across software, hardware, and payments, along with real retention, real scale, and a clear path to becoming the operating system for the entire industry, made this compelling.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
This $140 million raise accelerates several things in parallel: deepening our AI-powered product suite, expanding our offering for dry cleaners alongside laundromats, investing in new proprietary payment hardware infrastructure, and doubling down on our partnerships with route operators and equipment distributors. We’re also investing meaningfully in support and customer experience — because the operators we serve deserve a partner, not just a vendor.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
My advice is, it doesn’t matter. Fresh capital or not, there’s almost always another company out there with more capital, more resources, etc. A fundraiser is not a success metric — if anything, it adds more pressure and risk. Build the best product, deliver unbelievable customer service and support, price it where your costs are less than the value it creates, and be obsessed with your customers, market, and demand for excellence at your company. That recipe largely keeps any company ripping, no matter their cash on the balance sheet.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
I see Cents doubling down on laundry in every way. We are going to continue to build deeper partnerships with our distributors, invest heavily in the best support infrastructure in the industry, enable dry cleaners and other garment care SMBs to leverage our technology, create better payment experiences in shared laundry rooms, and bring AI-driven innovation to our customers. While this is a major milestone, we feel like we are in the very early innings of the impact we can make for our customers and partners.
What’s your favorite spring destination in and around the city?
Cents HQ in Hudson Square would be high on the list, but grabbing a coffee and walking to work, a happy hour outdoor in SoHo or the West Village, followed by dinner at Strip House, and a pit stop at Joyface is how I’d encourage anyone in New York to spend a beautiful spring day.
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