At the end of 2020, Presso turned around. It made a lot of sense then. People didn’t travel much and were therefore not too keen on having their business clothes dry cleaned. To be sure, the hospitality industry – which had been identified as a major potential revenue stream – had effectively ground to a halt.
Around that time, the movie industry was looking for a fast, safe, and efficient way to clean wardrobes at the height of the pandemic, and it just so happens that Presso’s hometown of Atlanta ranks among the top two or three filming locations in the US. however, that partnership would prove to be short-lived.
“What we found out a few months later was that most of these productions are only shot for a few months of the year,” co-founder and CEO Nishant Jain said during a phone call with ukbusinessupdates.com. “So we have to do reverse logistics every few months, which just doesn’t make economic sense for a startup business.”
It was a good temporary collaboration and a testing ground for Presso’s robotic dry cleaning kiosk. However, amid widespread reopenings, Presso is returning to its original customer base of hospitality/hotel and real estate companies. The startup’s newfound focus is propelled by an $8 million Series A raise from a slew of high-profile lenders, including Uncork Capital, 1517 Fund, AME Cloud Ventures, HAX, SOSV, Pathbreaker Ventures, VSC Ventures and YETI Capital.
The round brings Presso’s total funding to date to $10.1 million. That’s a lot for what is still an extremely small company with a workforce of 14. Certainly no one can blame the company for a conservative approach to growth over the past three years. The new funding will be used in part to grow the team, increasing the number to around 20-25 people over the next year. It will also be used to scale up its product and meet its 80+ bookings.
Presso uses a hardware-as-a-service model to effectively rent its offerings to customers. The companies both set prices to have a garment dry cleaned and take a portion of the revenue from the profits. The latter is adjustable, based on the amount they pay in advance.
In addition to developing its own hardware and leasing its machines, Presso creates other important pieces of the puzzle, including a newer, greener liquid for the dry cleaning process. “We had chemical engineers to develop our own fluids,” says Jain. “They are much more organic; 70% of industry still uses industrial solvents. We’ve invented something far better than anything we’ve ever seen.”
In the future, it could potentially license the fluid to third parties. For now, though, Presso is focusing on building — and distributing — its dry cleaning kiosks.
