Cents Secures $140M Series C

Key Takeaways

1. $140 million Series C closed by Cents, making it the largest single software investment ever made in the laundry vertical
2. The round was led by Sumeru Equity Partners, with continued participation from Camber Creek (Series B lead); the capital splits into $110M primary and $30M secondary via tender offer
3. Cents now powers 4,500+ laundromat locations across the U.S., processing close to $1 billion in payments annually, with a reported 99% operator retention rate
4. Total funding raised to date crosses $217 million, and the U.S. laundry market is projected to grow from $15.75 billion in 2024 to $22.51 billion by 2030 at a 6.3% CAGR

Quick Recap

New York-based laundry technology company Cents has officially closed a $140 million Series C funding round, as announced via PRNewswire on March 26, 2026. The round was led by Sumeru Equity Partners with continued support from Camber Creek, the firm that anchored its prior Series B. This raise is historic, not just for Cents but for the entire sector, as it marks the single largest software investment ever recorded in the U.S. laundry industry.

$140M Raise: Strategic Purpose

The $140 million is not a simple growth check. According to deal details, it breaks down into $110 million in primary capital and $30 million in secondary funding via a tender offer, the latter allowing early employees and investors to partially liquidate. This structure signals that Cents has reached a maturity where liquidity conversations are already on the table, which is a notable marker for a company founded as recently as 2021.

Sumeru Equity Partners, the growth-stage fund leading this round, has a track record of backing vertical SaaS companies, including platforms like JobNimbus, and has deployed over $3 billion in capital historically. Their partner Chris Litster and principal Nathan Stanley publicly called Cents “the go-to operating system for modern laundry and garment care,” a statement that positions this not as a niche bet but as a category-defining infrastructure play.

Camber Creek, a proptech-focused firm that also backs multifamily tools like Flex, participated again, reinforcing the thesis that laundry infrastructure increasingly overlaps with residential property tech. On the product side, the fresh capital will fuel three key expansion tracks: AI product development, hardware manufacturing and distribution, and expanded customer support operations.

Cents already runs an AI-powered receptionist called “Cents Assist” that reportedly resolves 75% to 100% of customer inquiries autonomously. The company also plans to scale its Dispatch (pickup and delivery) module and deepen international operations, including phone support in non-English markets.

CEO and co-founder Alexander Jekowsky, who previously sold a campus payments startup called Ulyngo to Modo Labs, brings direct SMB payments experience to this vertical. VP of Engineering Ethan Durham, also a co-founder from the Ulyngo team, has built Cents’ scalable technical stack, while CPO Gilli Cherrin drives product strategy. Sumeru’s Sanjeet Mitra is joining the board as part of this deal.

Laundry Industry: A New Tech Growth Phase

The U.S. is home to over 90,000 retail laundry businesses and hundreds of thousands of additional shared laundry facilities inside apartment buildings, hotels, and university campuses. Despite this scale, the sector has historically been one of the most cash-heavy and tech-averse small business categories in the country. Most operators still rely on disconnected tools, manual order tracking, and coin-operated machines with no digital payment layer. That fragmentation is exactly the problem Cents is monetizing.

The timing of this raise is also shaped by consolidation signals from across the industry. PayRange, a mobile payments provider, recently acquired Turns, a laundry software startup that had raised only $500,000 at the pre-seed stage. Meanwhile, Tide Services, a laundromat chain, has been acquiring 15 or more locations, pointing to a wave of roll-ups that smaller independent operators need technology to survive. Cents serves as the defensive tech layer for those independents, and by processing $1 billion in annual payments across 4,500 locations, it has already built meaningful switching costs.

Macro tailwinds are equally supportive. The U.S. laundry facilities and dry cleaning market stood at $15.75 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $22.51 billion by 2030 at a 6.3% compound annual growth rate. Rising demand for on-demand pickup and delivery, labor shortages pushing operators toward automation, and the post-pandemic normalization of app-based service consumption are all pulling the sector toward digitization faster than it would move on its own.

Competitive Landscape

Cents vs. CleanCloud vs. Geelus

The two most directly comparable competitors to Cents among scaled, independent software players in the laundry and garment care space are CleanCloud and Geelus. Both have significant user bases and ratings on platforms like G2 and Capterra, and both serve overlapping customer segments (dry cleaners, laundromats, alterations shops).

Strategic Analysis

Cents leads by a wide margin in infrastructure depth: proprietary hardware, AI-native workflows, integrated payments, and a dedicated logistics module create a vertically integrated stack that neither CleanCloud nor Geelus can currently match.

However, CleanCloud holds a global footprint advantage with a broader international user base and device-agnostic deployment that works for operators outside North America who lack access to Cents’ hardware ecosystem. Geelus, meanwhile, earns the highest user satisfaction scores among its niche of dry cleaners and boutique alterations shops, suggesting that its focused, lighter-weight toolset resonates strongly within that specific sub-segment, even without the scale or capital that Cents commands.

TechnoTrenz’s Takeaway

I’ll be direct here: this is one of the more underrated funding stories of early 2026, and I think it deserves more attention than it has received outside of fintech circles. In my experience covering vertical SaaS raises, the ones that tend to age well are not the flashy AI-native startups chasing enterprise contracts. They are the companies that quietly build payment infrastructure inside industries that Wall Street ignores. Cents is doing exactly that.

I find this particularly compelling because the laundry sector is not going away, and its resistance to digitization has always been a timing issue rather than a structural one. The fact that this round includes $30 million in secondary funding tells me investors are confident enough to let early stakeholders take chips off the table, which is a credibility signal I generally weight heavily. The 99% operator retention rate is also not a metric you fake at 4,500 locations.