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All-in-one software, payments and custom machine hardware for laundromats, grown from a would-be laundromat buyer's frustration to $60M in annual revenue.
$700K → $3M → $6M → $36M → $60M (2021–25) · 99% customer retention · ~$140M/month payment volume · 20%+ EBITDA margin
The wedge was delivery without new labor; the larger business came from owning more of the laundromat's daily operating stack.
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Cents is a New York company that sells laundromats, dry cleaners and shared apartment laundry rooms one system for running the business: point of sale, online ordering and delivery, custom payment hardware on the machines, marketing automation and AI customer service. Co-founder and CEO Alex Jekowsky got there by trying to buy laundromats. After selling his previous company he went looking for stores, had three under letters of intent, and realized he could not run them with the technology available: hauling quarters by hand and jury-rigging a Square terminal and paper logs next to a Toast point of sale. So at 23, instead of buying stores, he started building for them. The first code was written in 2019, and he went full-time in late 2020. Asked to attach years to the revenue, he gives about $700,000 in 2021, $3 million in 2022, $6 million in 2023, $36 million in 2024 and $60 million in 2025. Customer retention is about 99%, payment volume runs around $140 million a month, and the company operates at an EBITDA margin above 20% with about 94 people, roughly 80 at the end of last year, which works out to about $750,000 of revenue per employee. The jump from $6 million in 2023 to $36 million in 2024 lines up with hardware. Cents commercialized its own machine-payment device in late 2022 and early 2023, found hardware brutally hard, and bought a business in 2024 to accelerate it. Between 200,000 and 250,000 of its devices are now installed, and it powers nearly 7,000 apartment buildings' shared laundry rooms. It recently closed a $110 million Series C plus a $30 million employee tender, at a price Jekowsky accepts as somewhere between 10 and 20 times revenue.
Cents sells software and payment hardware to laundromats and other laundry operators. A credible first-customer path for this kind of vertical system starts with owners who are already feeling the cost of disconnected point-of-sale, machine payments and delivery coordination.
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“Uh, of the 60 million of revenue last year, how much was hardware versus percentage of GMV versus software for us as hardware…”
15:17 · hear it in the video“…uh between cash and and uh I think we're we're around 140 million a month uh or or so right now.”
15:48 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Founder-reported in a Nathan Latka interview: revenue by year ($700K in 2021, $3M, $6M, $36M, $60M in 2025), ~99% customer retention, ~$140M/month payment volume, 20%+ EBITDA margin, ~94 employees, 200–250K devices and ~7,000 apartment buildings. No statements are shown. The valuation is described only as 10–20x revenue; payment volume is not revenue.
Cents' first revenue came from a large New York laundry operator that let the team into its full store operation.
Cents' growth loops through a connected operating stack. A laundromat that adopts point of sale can add machine payments, hardware, online ordering, delivery coordination and customer marketing; each addition improves convenience while making the system harder to replace.
Laundry operators are practical buyers with live stores to run, so a young vendor may hear little until a system interrupts a shift or an owner sees a clear financial gain.
Cents combines software, payments and specialized hardware for laundry businesses. Its initial product was point of sale, followed by custom payment devices and integrations that support machine payments, online ordering and delivery. The platform is designed for both independent laundromats and larger operators, with workflows for store transactions and customer-facing services. Jekowsky describes delivery through gig platforms as a way for an operator to add a service without hiring drivers or buying delivery assets. The company later expanded into apartment-building shared laundry rooms, college campuses, dry cleaning and alterations. That expansion makes the product more than a register: it connects physical equipment, customer payments and store operations. A founder entering the category should validate hardware installation and payment reliability early, since the customer depends on these systems during daily store hours.
Cents earns money three ways that stack on each install. Hardware is the first hit: the custom device on each machine is sold at a healthy margin rather than as a loss leader, much as laundry equipment makers sell long-lived machines at good margins. Each device then carries software and payments with it, so a longer tail of SaaS fees and payment revenue follows. Payments are large: about $140 million a month flows through Cents' rails, largely driven by the hardware. Jekowsky reports $60 million of revenue last year without a split between hardware, software and payments. He says customer retention is about 99% and that net dollar retention sits in the 115–130% range he treats as best in class, because operators who install hardware rarely rip it out and keep adding products. Our read: the model is the classic vertical-SaaS bundle with hardware as the lock-in. Payment volume is not revenue; only Cents' share of each transaction counts. A new entrant should model gross profit per installed store across all three lines, and expect the hardware line to dominate cash needs early, as it did for Cents before its 2024 acquisition.
Our read: the hard part of this stack is physical. Cents custom-built its machine device, from the enclosure to the EMV payment modules and the screen, so it is more than an Android tablet running a point of sale. Jekowsky says the early hardware push cost a lot of money, brought in a couple of million dollars of sales, and was hard enough that buying a business in 2024 was the fastest way to de-risk it. The operating side is lean. With about 94 employees and an EBITDA margin above 20%, Cents runs at roughly $750,000 of revenue per employee, and Jekowsky's stated target is $1 million per head. He also reports 98% employee retention. A smaller entrant should test with off-the-shelf payment terminals and one software workflow, and build hardware only when device limits block adoption. Budget for payment compliance, installation, replacements, connectivity, support and integration upkeep. Prove gross profit per installed store before chasing a broad hardware footprint.
Copy the origin. Jekowsky found the opportunity by trying to buy the businesses he now serves, which is the fastest way to learn what an operator actually struggles with. Copy the wedge too: delivery for a nominal fee, with no labor or capex for the owner, was easy to say yes to and opened the door to the rest of the platform. Copy the sales sequence: an anchor customer that lets you see a whole operation, then five to ten more customers sold by hand, by walking in, filling out website contact forms and calling stores. Seed investors demanded exactly that proof before they would fund him. Change the scope. Cents is now point of sale, payments, custom hardware, delivery, marketing automation and AI customer service across laundromats, dry cleaners, apartment laundry rooms and campuses, financed by a $110 million Series C. A solo founder should pick one of those pieces for one segment, and use off-the-shelf payment hardware until volume justifies a custom device. Our read: the transferable idea is less laundry than the playbook. Look for a stable, cash-heavy local industry that venture money ignored, and become its operating system one wedge at a time.
Our read: the biggest operational risk is hardware. Jekowsky calls it brutally hard; Cents spent heavily, made only a couple of million dollars of hardware sales at first, and bought a business to fix execution. A payment device that fails mid-shift stops a store's revenue, so support quality is existential. Second, a growth ceiling. The industry cannot absorb 50,000 new locations a year, so Cents has to grow through wallet share at existing operators rather than store count. Jekowsky is explicit about the danger he wants to avoid: companies that raise at high valuations, slow from 100%-plus growth to 10%, and become zombies worth less at $120 million of revenue than they were at $50 million. Third, capital structure. Raising $140 million at somewhere between 10 and 20 times revenue only works if the company can later deliver four to six times that price to growth investors, and he warns that when big raises go wrong, founders, employees and common shareholders lose more than investors do. Fourth, concentration in payments economics: much of the value depends on processing roughly $140 million a month, so changes in card fees or competition from equipment makers' own payment systems would hit margins.
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