Cents.

The Story

Who they are now

Walk into a busy laundromat on a Saturday morning and you will see two centuries collide. The machines hum the same way they have since the 1950s. The detergent smells the same. But the front counter has changed. Where there was once a coffee can full of quarters and a spiral notebook of customer names, there is now a screen - taking card payments, routing a pickup-and-delivery driver, texting a customer that their wash-dry-fold is ready, and answering the phone with an AI voice while the owner is elbow-deep in someone else's towels.

That screen, more often than not, is Cents. The New York company has quietly become the operating system for garment care: software, payment hardware and logistics stitched into one platform that now runs more than 4,500 laundry and dry-cleaning locations and moves over a billion dollars a year. It is not a household name. Laundromats rarely are. That, it turns out, was the opportunity.

The Tension

The problem they saw

Here is the unglamorous truth the founders noticed: laundry is enormous and almost entirely un-modernized. There are roughly 90,000 retail laundry businesses in the United States, plus hundreds of thousands of shared laundry rooms. Most of them ran - and many still run - on coin mechanisms, paper tickets, and the owner's memory. The industry generates real money. It just never got real software.

Every other corner of small business got its tool. Restaurants got Toast. Salons got their booking apps. Retailers got Shopify. Laundromats got, generously, a card reader bolted onto a machine and a vendor who showed up once a quarter. The work was physical, the margins were thin, and the technology was somebody else's afterthought.

FIG. 1 - The before picture: a coffee can of quarters, a notebook, and a phone nobody can answer during a rush. Cents calls this "the status quo." Operators call it "Tuesday."

The Bet

The founders' bet

Cents was founded in 2019 by Alex Jekowsky, Pramod Dabir and Gilli Cherrin - software people, not laundry people, which was either a liability or the entire point depending on how you looked at it. Jekowsky had already built and sold a company (Ulyngo, acquired by Modo Labs) and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He could have built software for almost anything. He picked laundromats.

The bet was simple to state and hard to execute. Do not sell a laundromat one more gadget. Sell it the whole system - point of sale, on-machine payments, delivery routing, marketing, memberships, reporting - so the owner stops gluing together five vendors and starts running the business from one place. The unfashionable part was the depth required. You cannot fake understanding how a wash-dry-fold order actually flows when the store is slammed. Cents made that understanding the product.

The Product

The product

What Cents actually sells is less a single app than a stack. The pieces have names that sound like a small cast of helpful coworkers, and roughly behave like them.

FIG. 2 - Six products, one login. The naming convention suggests a friendly office; the architecture suggests a company that really did read the operator's mind.

Underneath the friendly names sits the part investors actually care about: payments. Once a billion dollars a year flows across your software, you are no longer just a SaaS subscription. You are infrastructure. That is the quiet reason a laundromat tool attracted growth-equity money usually reserved for cybersecurity and data analytics.

The hardware matters here too, and it is the part most software companies refuse to touch. Building a card reader that survives a humid laundromat, talks to a forty-year-old dryer, and starts a machine remotely is a slow, physical kind of engineering. Plenty of startups would rather ship an app and call it a platform. Cents went and built the box that bolts onto the machine, because without it the software would only ever describe the business instead of running it. The on-machine payment, the remote start, the live revenue figure that updates as the drum spins - those exist only because someone was willing to do the unfashionable work.

What an operator can actually do with all of this is the part worth sitting with. A single owner can open the dashboard and see, in real time, which machines are earning and which are idle. They can set up a wash-dry-fold membership that bills automatically. They can dispatch a driver along a geofenced route for pickup-and-delivery, send a review request the moment an order closes, and let an AI answer the phone during the lunch rush instead of losing the call. None of these are exotic features in software at large. In laundry, having them in one place was close to unheard of.

FIG. 3 - Seven years, three rounds, one stubbornly unsexy market. The line goes up.

The Proof

The proof

Ambition is cheap; laundromats are skeptical. The case for Cents is in the numbers operators actually generate on it.

FIG. 4 - The chart most founders dream of and few in laundry ever draw. Each bar is a vote of confidence in quarters becoming code.

The backers reflect the same logic. Bessemer came in early. Camber Creek, which knows physical real estate and the businesses inside it, led Series B and stayed. Sumeru Equity Partners - a firm that has put billions into enterprise and vertical software - led the Series C and took a board seat. None of them invest in coffee cans of quarters. They invest in the system replacing them.

It is worth noting what the proof is not. Cents has not published a valuation, and it has not claimed to have conquered the market. Ninety thousand businesses is a large number, and 4,500 of them is a real start, not a finish. The honest version of the story is that an enormous, sleepy category finally has a serious software company aimed at it, and the early adopters are sticking. In a world of startups promising to disrupt everything, there is something almost refreshing about one content to simply digitize the laundromat down the street.

The Mission

The mission

Cents describes its goal as building the first "laundry market network" - not just tools for one store, but a connected system for an entire fragmented industry. The mission is to bring genuinely modern technology - AI-native software, proprietary hardware, integrated payments - to operators who were never anyone's priority customer. It is, in the company's framing, an operator-first project. The unsexiness is the moat.

The Stakes

Why it matters tomorrow

The thing about owning the payments and the software for a category is that you also own its data and its next decade. Where Cents goes next - deeper AI for customer service, smarter machine monitoring, more of the delivery economy - it goes with 4,500 stores and a billion dollars of behavior to learn from. Competitors selling a single card reader cannot follow there.

So return to that Saturday-morning laundromat. The machines still hum. The detergent still smells the same. But the owner is no longer chained to the counter. The phone gets answered. The driver gets routed. The membership renews on its own. The quarters, slowly, are becoming a memory. That is the whole pitch of Cents - not that laundry got exciting, but that running it finally got easier. Boring, done well, turns out to be worth a great deal.