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HAX’s Presso locks in $8M in seed funding for sustainable dry-cleaning
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Lauren McCranie
Lauren McCranie
January 20, 2023
Presso
Presso combines “StretchAI” robotics and earth-friendly cleaning liquids to clean and press clothes in less than five minutes. Source: Presso

HAX’s low-carbon, earth-friendly dry-cleaning startup Presso (HAX 2018) has secured $8M in seed funding from SOSV, Uncork Capital, 1517 Fund, AME Cloud Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, VSC Ventures, and YETI Capital. This round brings Presso’s total funding to $10.1M.

TechCrunch featured the news in an article highlighting the company’s milestone and renewed focus on hospitality and hotel companies. Presso co-founder and CEO Nishant Jain told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used to expand the 14-person company to 20–25 people within the next year and scale its product to meet Presso’s 80+ bookings.

Using a hardware-as-a-service model, Presso builds and distributes sustainable dry-cleaning kiosks primarily to hotel companies and real estate firms. The company uses patent-pending robotic stretching technology to perfectly stretch different types of garments to create premier pressing quality. Presso’s technology and process consumes 7x less water and 3x less electricity than traditional laundry and dry-cleaning services, and increases the lifetime of garments by over 4x, reducing the need for excessive textile manufacturing.

And while 70% of dry-cleaners rely on carcinogenic solvents, Presso uses all organic and compostable cleaning liquids. The startup has created a new, environmentally-friendly fluid for the dry-cleaning process. Speaking about this new formula, Jain remarked: “We had chemical engineers to develop our own liquids. They’re far more organic; 70% of the industry still uses industrial solvents. We invented something that is orders of magnitudes better than we’ve ever seen.”

In the future, Presso’s environmentally-friendly cleaning fluid could be licensed out to third parties, but for now, the company remains focused on producing and scaling the world’s first-ever “EcoRobo” garment care machine.

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