How Does Laundry Software Make $60M a Year? | Alex Jekowsky CEO TryCents

At 23, Alex Jekowsky started building Cents, an all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for laundromats, dry cleaners, and shared laundry rooms. In 2025, Cents generated $60 million in revenue, up 67%, with just 80 employees and EBITDA margins above 20%. The company now has 99% customer retention, powers laundry rooms in nearly 7,000 apartment buildings, and recently raised a $140 million Series C at an approximately $800 million valuation. In this episode, Alex reveals: • How Cents grew from $700,000 to $60 million in four years • Why its first customer was a 73-location laundry operator • How Cents combines software, payments, and custom-built hardware • Why the company generates roughly $750,000 in revenue per employee • How Cents maintains 99% customer retention • Why Alex acquired a hardware company instead of continuing to build everything internally • How the $140 million financing included a $30 million employee tender • Why founders should avoid raising at valuations that eliminate future options • How Alex plans to turn an overlooked industry into a multibillion-dollar company

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I got into it because I wanted to buy laundromats. The more you learn about this industry, the more excited you get, but the more surprised you are of how well it does for the lack of technology. And that's where we decided instead of buying stores, starting to build for them. The custom build hardware is where we both have margin, but it does so much more than just function as a screen and a payment acceptor.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  How many of these are in the wild today installed?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  200,000, 250,000, something along those lines.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Okay, what's the target for the end of year this year? Do you have a target?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  A hell of a lot more than than last year.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Can you double? Can you break 120 by December this year?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Could we? I think it's possible.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Hey folks, my guest today is Alex Jekowsky. He's the co-founder and CEO of Sense.com, a New York-based all-in-one software, hardware and payments platform, triple threat that are built specifically for the laundry industry. These are laundry mats, dry cleaners and multifamily shared laundry rooms. They bundle POS, online ordering, on-machine payment hardware with marketing automation and AI customer service all in one. A big vertical SaaS business. Alex, ready to take us to the top?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Let's do it. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I mean, you are a triple threat integrating all these things into one. Did you start off in hardware or software or payments? Or was it all from day one?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  The idea when we started the company is there's one way to do this if you want to build a multi-billion dollar business. It's not a point solution. It's not just a point of sale. It's not like we have to be the all-in-one. And the beauty of vertical SaaS, right? It's a smaller market, but you should have higher penetration, higher retention and higher attachment rates to all the products you deploy going forward. Right? So we started with the point of sale because software easier than hardware. From an iteration perspective, from a deployment perspective, from a hiring perspective, from a cost perspective. So we started a core product with the point of sale as we were building the hardware. Then we commercialized the hardware in kind of late 2022, early 2023. And then realized, damn, this hardware thing really hard. And while we made, you know, a couple million dollars of sales

• 1:58Speaker 00

  and we were pouring a lot of money into the effort, realized best way to de-risk and accelerate that execution was potentially through M&A. And that's what led us to kind of buying a business in 2024 that accelerated a lot of our hardware growth.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Alex, take us back to day one. When did you guys write the first line of code for the business?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  I always mark like, when did I take the first risk of going full-time? That was around October, November of 2020. I got into it because I wanted to buy laundromats. After I sold my last company, I wanted to open a bar. And you meet enough people that own bars who say maybe not the thing to do. While it didn't end up being the bar, I was most interested in the laundromat space. The more I learned about it, found stores I wanted to buy. And the more you learn about this industry, the more excited you get, but the more surprised you are of how well it does for the lack of technology. And that's where we decided instead of buying stores, starting to build for them. And so that was probably, you know, 2019, first line of code.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of people in AI right now are saying, what's the AI hedge? Go buy shit AI can't replace. Why didn't you actually go roll up laundromats?

• 3:00Speaker 00

  When I was looking at buying stores, I was hell-bent on buying those stores. I was had LOIs for three locations. I was like all in, biz, buy, sell, the whole, the whole nine. It was the function of I have a relatively sizable earn-out at a company that just acquired my business. Like I need to be able to do this with the least amount of effort possible. I'm sophisticated enough. I should be able to implement the right systems. That meant I didn't have to go handle a metric ton of quarters on a monthly basis and, you know, hire a person to do delivery when there's the gig economy everywhere and not jerry-rig a square with paper logs and a toast POS to make. So all of that made me realize I don't even know how I could run these stores with the level of technology available. But I fell so deeply in love with the industry and so deeply in love with the opportunity

• 3:45Speaker 00

  of the fact that there really, there was no venture-backed, no growth equity-backed, no sophisticated institutional technology infrastructure for these operators. Because all the money that went into laundry tech was the Uber for laundry. And guess where all the Uber for laundry companies take their laundry to? Local laundromat. But it got no love because people didn't appreciate the TAM. They thought the operators weren't sophisticated enough, whatever it might be. And we love to say, boy, were they wrong.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  How old were you in 2019?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  23.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Okay. And generally speaking, were you already pretty well off as a 23-year-old from your prior exit?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  I think in context, yeah. I mean, I think in the world of where you want to be in life, no. But, you know, I had it cushy, we'll just say.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Take us through when you got your first paying customer and then the growth tactics to get your first 100 customers.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were introduced to a large-scale operator in New York as kind of our first customer. And most people say, don't sign the whale first. You overbuild, you have all these enterprise issues the SMB doesn't have. I challenged that by industry because if your, if your first customer is a big enterprise customer, they tend to be invested in your success. And really this operator gave us their full store and their entire GNA to help us understand what's important. And in our vertical, and I think a lot of SMBs, you know, a 73-store operator or a one-store operator are not remarkably different from a store operation standpoint. They're just, the problems that a one-store operator has compounds meaningfully for the large scale. But we learned a hell of a lot and were able to build a product

• 5:17Speaker 00

  that may be a little overbuilt in the beginning, but set the right foundation. I thought this big customer would be enough for us to raise capital. All the feedback I got from, from seed investors early on was, prove to me you can pound the pavement and you can sell another five or 10 customers yourself. If you can't do that, I don't understand how you think more capital will get you where you want to be. It was really pounding the pavement to try to figure out the product market fit. The way I did it was physically walking into stores or going into the contact form on all the websites if operators had them, or picking up the phone and calling the store and trying to figure out if they didn't do delivery. We were building the first ever gig economy integration for delivery. So leveraging Uber, DoorDash, et cetera, to build two-way logistics, which had never been done in the space before.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And we saw that as here, for a nominal fee, you can add ancillary revenue with no labor capex, et cetera, to launch delivery and grow your, the small business owner's, you know, addressable market. And that was the wedge to say, oh, we also have this hardware product we're building and this point of sale, et cetera. And that is kind of what helped us build up, get about 80 total stores.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Do you remember what revenue finished for in 2021?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  I think we went from basically zero to about 700,000 in 2021. And then 3 million, 6 million, 36, 60. And then it starts to really ramp and scale from there. We're not adding 50,000 rooftops a year. You know, the industry can't sustain that. What we care about is we have 99% customer retention. Like that's the number that we care the most about. Because if you build the right product, you build it the right way, you're transparent, reliable and communicative to the customer, you know, and you have an industry dynamic where it's so stable as an industry, you have these really remarkable metrics that facilitate a lot of the growth.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Can you attach years to the dollar figures you just gave me? So 700K, 2021.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Okay, what's the target for the end of year this year? Do you have a target?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  You know, a hell of a lot more than than last year's.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Can you double? Can you break 120 by December this year?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Could we? I think it's possible. Does it make sense for our business, our customers or the industry? That is where I don't necessarily believe. I think what we want to do is dive deep into the customer needs and focus a whale more on, on net dollar retention versus just location count growth. I think where you see a lot of tech companies fail is you see this big valuation. They've raised at a billion-dollar valuation. They're growing hundreds of percent a year as, you know, at 20 million of revenue or something like that. Then they get to 100 million of revenue and then the growth is more like 10%. Or it's declining from, from, from 100 down to 30, down to 20, down to 10. And if the EBITDA margin isn't there, you become a zombie where at $120 million of revenue, you're worth less than you were at 50.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Growth will eventually come down. It's just as inevitability as you get bigger. So how is the business positioned for when growth starts to look like 30 to 40%? So our, our view on growth is being durably compounding as a business with strong efficiency invested in the areas that lead to customer value and success. That is the safest position to be in, in a bull or bear market.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  99% retention, but if you're crushing it, going deeper, getting more wallet share from these same operators, net dollar retention should obviously be much above that, especially if they install hardware. It's very rare that they're going to rip that out. What is your net dollar retention target and where are you today?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Where we want to be is at the top, if not greater than that. I think best-in-class benchmark you see from Bestmmer's website or Insight or anything of the kind of 115 to 130. That's within the realm of like, you want to, you want to be living there in general.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Are you there today?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  For us, yes. We only have, you know, 90 or so employees, maybe 94 employees at the scale of revenue that we're at today. So again, for us, efficiency and doing things in the capacity that we can do than that the industry can sustain is what is most important.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  60 million last year of revenues with 94 employees. I mean, you have.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Well, technically, we had like, technically, we had like 80 at the end of last year.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'll give you even more. I'll do, I'll give you even more credit then, right? 60 million divided by 80, I think is about 750,000 of revenue per employee, which is world-class, right? How are you doing so much with so little? And were you profitable last year?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're, we're operating at about 20% EBITDA margin. We like to push our team. One of our, one of our executives, Nick Deen, on our sales side, he has a great quote I love using, which is, you know, people grow linearly and businesses grow exponentially. And we've had a really good time having our people grow exponentially alongside it. And I, sometimes I look at companies with hundreds of employees, I don't even know what they do all day. And I think people, you know, we have, the best metric outside of customer retention is 98% employee retention. I've only lost, I think, three, maybe four employees ever that make over 100 grand. And so I think it's a culture that embraces failure as an opportunity to succeed and grow.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  And that pushes that level of, I think. Culture connectivity because we're all in this shit together kind of thing. But we'll never be happy until we at least hit a million of revenue for every one headcount. That is, that's the benchmark.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  So if someone's thinking, wow, 20% EBITDA profit, you know, profits in 2025 on 60 million. Why would he go out and do the 140 million Series C? What was your thinking?

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Well, hopefully you never raise capital when you need to. That's always not a great position to be in. When we did this round, we said, here's, this is the valuation we want to raise at. And these are the terms we want to raise at. It wasn't if somebody offered 20% more or X percent this way. The other didn't sway us. We had higher term sheets. We had different term by different folks. I think the, the thing that drove us to, to want to raise the capital was the quality of the partnership of Sumeru. It's just an amazing group, top to bottom. And I mean, we went, probably had three or four dinners before we even started in the process. And in aggregate of the 12 hours of, of dinners and in, you know, I don't even know how many bottles of wine. We probably talked about sends for an hour or two, but as people, they just were incredible. And that's what we indexed on.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  I always said, like, I never want to be afraid of going into a board meeting. I'm okay to be frustrated and angry knowing I'm going to get my ass kicked, but I want to be afraid because afraid means I don't know the people around the table. I don't know how to predict them. I don't know who they are or how they're going to react. Like we know, we know each other and we've been able to build that bond. So that was a big reason. And the other side of it again is accelerate growth, meaning pull the out years in and being able to get into dry cleaning and our, and our shared laundry rooms and multifamily properties. You power now, you know, nearly 7,000 apartment buildings, shared laundry rooms, college campuses, all of that. And pushing deeper into other retail sides in terms of dry cleaning alterations, et cetera. And we knew we, we wanted capital to do that and bring on a great partner to steward that next phase of growth on the board.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  And then also provide liquidity for some of our employees. We did an employee tender as part of this.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  What percent of 140 million was for that sort of thing versus operations?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Operationally, I think it was like, we did a Series C close of 110 million and a $30 million tender. And even in the 110, there were still some, some, some secondaries there. So I would say it wasn't, it wasn't primarily for growth capital, but definitely growth capital is helping us fuel a huge amount of the continued kind of accelerant of our growth.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  You just closed this in a couple of months ago, 90 days ago. Are you comfortable sharing what you saw in terms of valuation?

• 12:33Speaker 00

  When we kind of set the valuation target, it was, all right, we know at this price, these are the buyer profiles. And this is the path to liquidity for us. And what I tell every, like, I have a share price calculator in our financial model from now until 2031 monthly. We know what percentage of the market we need to have. We know all of the relevant metrics to have an outcome. Now, for context, like I love this business. I'll run this till they don't let me. So when I think about liquidity, it's not so I can sell it. It's so I, you know, we provide liquidity for some and we continue to rip it. But we feel very confident in the price that we raised at to deliver the kind of outcome that an investor is looking for at this stage.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Can I pin you down though and put you somewhere between a 10 and 20x revenue multiple?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yes. You can pin me, you can pin me down, down somewhere.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And the reads, I look, it's a valuable lesson for founders, right? So Alex, correct me if this is wrong. What Alex is thinking is listen, 140 is a lot of money. 10 to 20x feels okay. If we keep growing, he sees outcomes where someone would pay more than that multiple. Everyone would be in the money, basically himself, investors, employees, everybody. Alex, is that sort of accurate?

• 13:34Speaker 00

  The way that I view it is, you know, when you're getting the multiple and that's driving the enterprise value and somebody invests at that, at that price, can you get, if it's growth equity, can you get four to six X that price in an outcome with enough of a buyer profile where, you know, why do people go public? Going public isn't a liquidity event. It's a financing event because you've raised too much capital. The preference stack is, is crazy. It's usually because you kind of have to at a certain point. And you're too big to be bought or whatever the, the case may be. And so we want to preserve as much optionality as possible for an exit event, whether it's going public, selling to a strategic, private equity, or staying private and, and holding the business for as long as, as we want. And so, but, but no matter what, in order to preserve that optionality, you have to be in a position to be able

• 14:19Speaker 00

  to have a growth equity or private equity event or a public event or something like that. Or you need to have the cash flows to stay private and not constantly need more capital. We've seen it more often than not where companies raise at large prices and the investors rarely lose. The founders will lose more. The employees will lose more. The common stockholders will lose more.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  How much today of the company, just all in, is the ESOP pool plus you plus employees, basically non-investors? How much do they still own?

• 14:47Speaker 00

  We're not giving percentages on, on that out necessarily, but I, what I will say is the, the, the common stockholders are very well positioned and this is a founder-led business. And so we've really indexed on ensuring that all of our investors are aligned with the founders and the team. We want all of us to succeed and be aligned in what it takes for that to happen. And if all of the interests are aligned, you tend to have a really productive board and you tend to have a lot of trust and, and transparency at the table.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Take us home here on product. Of the 60 million of revenue last year, how much was hardware versus percentage GMV versus software?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  For us, as hardware is unique because it's really a payments hardware product. So you have this big push of revenue on, on hardware. There it is right there. Big push of revenue on hardware, but every hardware device that goes out there has SaaS and payments attached to it. So you have this hit of revenue and then the longer tail SaaS and payments, you know, revenue line flows from there. And so that's, obviously, you know, we, we process a huge amount of payments through our rails between cash and,

• 15:50Speaker 01

  How much?

• 15:51Speaker 00

  I think we're, we're around 140 million a month or so right now. So it's a pretty sizable volume that flows through. And again, that is largely driven by the hardware that we sell. So every one time.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Do you make margin on the hardware or is it a loss leader for the payment volume?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  No, that's the, the hardware is one, it's a great margin product for us. And it's similar to like, like, look, the laundry equipment manufacturers, they sell this one-time piece of laundry equipment. It's got great margin, provides a ton of value and lasts a really, really long time for the customers. We don't view hardware as a gateway to software. I mean, obviously it is, but the hardware itself standalone, it isn't just an Android tablet. Like we custom-built that device that's on that machine from the enclosure to the EMV modules, to the screen, to everything to have standalone value to the operator beyond just here's an Android tablet that comes with a point of sale. The custom-built hardware is where we both have margin, but it does so much more than just function as a screen and a payment acceptor.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  How many of these are in the wild today installed?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  It's 200,000, 250,000, something along those lines. I don't have the number in my, in my head, but it's a lot. There's a lot of them out there.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alex, I could talk to you forever. I mean, you're in so many different product lines. You're in a really interesting space. You're not sort of touting this, we're going to be worth $30 billion because we're an AI product. You're just doing the good stuff the right way with good people and, you know, serving the customers. So if people fell in love with you, just watching you, your answers, they want to get behind you as well. I mean, are you hiring or like, where, where do you want to direct people?

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're, we're hiring. So, you know, trycens.com, T R Y C E N T S.com or LinkedIn. Feel free to message me on LinkedIn or look at our, look at our page, your general interest applications. If there's a role that we're not actively hiring for that you're interested in, go take a look and we'd love to connect.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Alex, thanks for taking us to the top, man. Appreciate it.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Awesome. Thanks, David.

• 17:37Speaker 01

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