Washmen, a dry cleaning and laundry service based in Dubai, said today in a statement to media that it has raised $6.2 million in its Series B round.
AddVenture, a multinational venture capital firm with headquarters in Russia and a history of investing in Dubai-based ServiceMarket, led the round. Leading consumer goods company Henkel in Germany, Cedar Mundi Ventures and B&Y Partners in Lebanon, and Clara Ventures in the United Arab Emirates joined the round as well. With this round, Washmen has raised a total of $7.8 million.
After launching its own 30,000-square-foot laundry and dry-cleaning facility last month, Washmen, which was founded in 2015 by Rami Shaar and Jad Halaoui, now fully owns the supply chain. Initially, the company used an asset-light model to connect customers with logistics partners and existing laundromats.
By choosing pick-up and drop-off times, customers can use Washmen’s mobile app (for iOS or Android) to order laundry or dry-cleaning services. Users can choose to request next-day delivery by paying a 50% premium on the charges, but the turnaround time is 48 hours.
According to Washmen’s statement, they have improved unit economics and customer retention over the past four years by gradually integrating vertically across the supply chain. According to the startup, it is now the biggest dry cleaning and laundry business in the United Arab Emirates.
Max Medvedev, Managing Partner at AddVenture that has invested in other on-demand laundry and dry cleaning services across the world, said, “Vertical integration is a must because it ensures the best quality of cleaning and it improves gross margins to a level that we haven’t seen anywhere in the world in this industry. They are truly innovators in this space, developing new hardware and software for dry cleaning facility and disrupting the traditional thinking about the cleaning process.”
The investment will be used by Washmen to expand its technology development office in Beirut and strengthen operations in the United Arab Emirates.
