The customer relationship platform that turned the humble car wash into a subscription business - and runs on more than 3,000 of them.
Pull into an unlimited-wash lane in most American suburbs and you are, whether you notice it or not, a subscriber. The car wash industry spent the last decade quietly reinventing itself around monthly memberships - the same recurring-revenue model that powers streaming services and gyms. Rinsed is the company that noticed the plumbing behind that shift was missing, and built it.
Founded in 2019 by Austin Esecson, Nic Hippenmeyer and Sam Logan, Rinsed makes a customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed for exactly one type of business: the car wash. It does not sell hardware, and it does not ask operators to rip out the point-of-sale systems they already own. Instead, it plugs into that existing equipment and layers on the tools a subscription business needs - automated email and text marketing, online membership sign-ups, churn-reduction workflows, salesperson coaching, and analytics that turn a wash's raw transaction data into decisions.
The result is a vertical software company operating in a market that generalist investors tend to skip past. And yet the numbers are not small. Rinsed says its platform runs on more than 3,000 car washes across the United States and Canada and manages over four million active memberships - more subscribers than many consumer apps with far higher name recognition.
At its core, Rinsed answers a deceptively simple question for car wash operators: who are your members, and why are they leaving? Before software like this, that information lived in disconnected point-of-sale terminals, spreadsheets and the memory of whoever ran the register. Rinsed consolidates it - membership status, visit history, spend, payment health - into one system, then acts on it automatically.
The most valuable of those actions is unglamorous. In any subscription business, a large share of cancellations begins with a single declined credit card. Rinsed detects those failures and at-risk members and fires off automated recovery messages before the customer drifts away. It is not a flashy feature. It is, for a car wash owner, often the difference between a member who churns and one who renews for another year.
Rinsed's customers are car wash operators of every size - independent single-site owners and large multi-location chains alike. Named users include Crew Carwash, GO Car Wash, Caliber Car Wash, Metro Express, Breeze Thru, Champion Xpress and Rocket Carwash.
Membership models are lucrative but leaky. Operators pour money into signing up new members, then watch a steady stream cancel - some deliberately, many because a card expired or a family only needed one plan when they bought two. Rinsed attacks that leak from both ends: growing sign-ups through online checkout and pay-station coaching, and cutting churn through automated win-back and payment-recovery messaging.
It also gives operators something they rarely had before - visibility. Real-time dashboards show membership growth, conversion rates, churn and revenue, so a decision that used to be made on instinct can be made on data.
Integrates with existing POS hardware to unify customer data, membership status, visit history and spend in one place.
Lifecycle campaigns for acquisition, upsell and win-back, tuned to how car wash customers actually behave.
Website checkout and sign-up forms so drivers can buy and upgrade unlimited-wash plans directly online.
Detects at-risk members and failed payments, then triggers automated recovery messaging to prevent cancellations.
Multi-vehicle and fleet membership products that grow revenue per location.
Pay-station sales coaching with real-time conversion tracking, leaderboards and gamification.
Rinsed's competitive position rests on depth, not breadth. General subscription and CRM tools can technically be bent to fit a car wash, and rival car wash and POS vendors such as DRB, Sonny's, Amp and WashCard address pieces of the same problem. Rinsed's answer is to know the car wash customer better than anyone - and to require no rip-and-replace, since it sits on top of the hardware an operator already runs.
That focus is also why the company has been able to expand into the moment a membership is actually sold. When Rinsed acquired Ignite Wash in 2024 and partnered with point-of-sale maker NXT Wash, it collapsed the sales pitch and the checkout onto a single tablet: a salesperson can present a plan, the customer can buy it, and the sale can close on one screen, with the member's profile live in the CRM the instant they return.
Rinsed is a textbook case of vertical SaaS - software so specific to one industry that horizontal competitors cannot easily follow it in. It occupies the customer-data and revenue-growth layer of the car wash technology stack, complementary to the POS and equipment vendors rather than competing with them head-on. In a fragmented, multi-billion-dollar industry shifting rapidly to recurring revenue, that position has attracted backers usually associated with frontier technology: Founders Fund, Bedrock Capital, VMG Technology and Y Combinator.
Total raised roughly $41M. Investors include Founders Fund, Bedrock Capital, VMG Technology, Y Combinator (W21) and Mischief.
Austin Esecson, Nic Hippenmeyer and Sam Logan set out to bring modern CRM software to car washes moving to subscriptions.
Early capital from Founders Fund, Bedrock Capital and Mischief.
Led by Bedrock Capital and Founders Fund to scale the car wash CRM.
VMG Technology leads; Rinsed reports ~400% customer growth and 4M+ memberships managed.
Adds a salesperson platform and partners with NXT Wash to unify sales and POS on one device.
Passes the milestone of supporting over 3,000 washes across the U.S. and Canada.
How Rinsed built a durable business in a market most investors overlooked.
The economics of a car wash membership and why declined cards decide unit economics.
The investment thesis behind Rinsed's Series A and B.
How buying Ignite Wash let Rinsed own the moment a membership is sold.
Inside the Rinsed and NXT Wash integration that merged sales and POS.
What car wash customer data at scale reveals about retention and pricing.
Rinsed is a CRM and marketing platform built specifically for car washes. It integrates with a wash's existing point-of-sale hardware to grow and retain unlimited-wash membership subscriptions through automated email and text marketing, online sign-ups, churn reduction and analytics.
Rinsed was founded in 2019 by Austin Esecson (CEO), Nic Hippenmeyer (CTO) and Sam Logan (COO). It is headquartered in New York City and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch.
Rinsed supports more than 3,000 car washes across the U.S. and Canada and manages over 4 million active memberships.
Roughly $41 million total, including a $12M Series A (2022) led by Bedrock Capital and Founders Fund and a $20M Series B (2023) led by VMG Technology, plus earlier funding from Y Combinator and Mischief.
Rinsed is a B2B SaaS company. It charges car wash operators a software subscription, typically per location, layered on top of their existing POS, and expands revenue through add-ons like its salesperson platform, online sales and fleet/family plans.
Reporting drawn from Rinsed's newsroom, PR Newswire, Y Combinator, Built In NYC, Auto Laundry News and CarwashPro. Figures such as revenue and headcount are third-party estimates and approximate.