Flush with fresh funds, UK ‘eco laundry’ startup Oxwash spins up growth plans

Oxwash, a UK startup that’s spent the last few years applying high tech processes to shrink the environment cost of dry cleaning and commercial laundry, has trousered £10 million (~$12M) in Series A funding to expand its nationwide footprint.

Currently its service is available in five UK cities: London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Manchester but — flush with fresh funding — it’s aiming for broader domestic coverage and eyeing a US launch after that.

Oxwash bagged a £1.4M seed back in 2020 — and has now pulled in a total of £15.7M since being founded back in 2017, including from a public equity crowdfunder last year (which netted it £500k from around 320 Crowdcube investors); and via a £2.08M seed top-up.

The Series A was led by Untitled VC, with existing backer Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder) also participating, along with Indeed founder Paul Forster, and Holly and Sam Branson. Other named returning investors include Reckitt venture arm Access VC, Pentland Group, Ascension Ventures, Vala Capital, and Truesight Ventures. While new investors in the round include 8 Dimension Ventures, System Capital Management and Khimji Ramdas LLC.

Oxwash’s alternative spin on commercial laundry includes a “gentle” ‘wet cleaning’ technique to replace dry cleaning which involving the use of biodegradable detergents (rather than “harsh” solvents) — and it also touts reduced water consumption (claiming savings of 4L per 1kg of clothes washed).

Additionally, it uses ozone as a disinfecting agent, to sterilize and deoderize fabrics at lower temperatures than traditional commercial laundry processes.

To ensure economies of scale, the on-demand laundry startup operates its services out of a handful of hubs (currently three) — aka its service center “lagoons” — using a fleet of cargo e-bike and electric vehicles for pick ups and drop offs to minimize its carbon emissions.

In a major development, it’s announcing that it’s gained B Corporation status — and claims to be the only laundry and wet-cleaning company in the world that’s gained this certification for standards of environmental, social responsibility and transparency, bolstering its eco credentials.

Oxwash customers span both businesses and individuals seeking on-demand laundry service (think the likes of individual Airbnb hosts up to NHS trusts). On the b2b side, it says customers include hotels, hospitals, universities, hospitality and circular fashion outlets.

Back in May 2020, Oxwash was reporting “several hundred” business customers and more than 4,000 individual users. Its press release doesn’t offer updated figures (we’ve asked) but it touts quadrupled revenue in the last 12 months, as well as stating it’s achieved “operational profitability” across its three washing facilities.

The new funding will go on UK expansion, with the startup planning to build a giant, centralized washing facility which it intends to use to service clients “up and down the country”.

It’s also planning a US launch (although, back in May 2020, it was talking about European expansion — so has presumably it’s reconfigured its international growth plans).

Other plans for the funding include investment in new methods to further enhance its approach, such as acoustic drying — i.e. using soundwaves instead of heat to dry textiles.

It also mentions potentially applying robotics and computer vision for further optimization of its processes.

Additionally, in the next 12 months Oxwash says it has a goal of completely eliminating scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions from its operations. 

Commenting in a statement, CEO Dr Kyle Grant said: “This new funding will be used primarily to develop our technology and invest deeply into the complete decarbonisation of our proprietary washing process. Up to 30% will be used for expanding our software technology capabilities, 30% for the deployment of our nationwide processing facility and the remainder for business development and growth.”

“Starting a business just before a global pandemic and economic crisis is no one’s ideal business plan, and as we all know the needs of consumers and businesses have changed dramatically over the last couple of years. For us, this has meant focusing on building out a solution that is frictionless for our business clients — the last thing they need to worry about is how their laundry will get cleaned.

“BCorp accreditation cements our commitment to responsible business and is another assurance to our customers that we are doing business the right way. It is undoubtedly the most robust certification available to demonstrate our dedication to sustainability and transparency that Oxwash is taking as a high growth company.”

Currently, the startup employs over 80 people and says it’s expecting a 50% boost in headcount in the next year as it pushes to expand services nationwide — scaling out from its existing service bases in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Notably, Oxwash’s delivery riders and couriers are fully employed (unlike on-demand delivery platforms that rely on the so-called ‘gig economy’ model) — and it also specifies that all staff are paid in excess of the national living wage.

 

Founder alleges that YC-backed fintech startup is ‘copy-and-pasting’ its business

A new startup lifting elements of competing businesses is far from unusual in today’s venture world, but sometimes competing founders don’t find the imitation all that flattering.

Andy Bromberg, CEO of the a16z-backed startup Eco, is claiming that Pebble, another fintech startup that came out of stealth this morning, “plagiarized” Eco’s materials and business model. Bromberg posted a Twitter thread this afternoon saying Pebble engaged in “copy-and-pasting, immaturity, lying, and espionage.” In the thread, Bromberg detailed the background behind his claims, and he also spoke to TechCrunch about the allegations.

Bromberg claims the Pebble co-founders, CEO Aaron Bai and CTO Sahil Phadnis, impersonated Y Combinator investors to get access to Eco’s waitlist. He also alleges that Phadnis asked detailed questions about Eco’s backend under the guise of looking for employment and that multiple aspects of Pebble’s product and marketing language are essentially copy-pasted from Eco.

Bromberg’s Twitter thread encouraged Bai and Phadnis to reach out to Bromberg directly. When TechCrunch reached out to Pebble for comment on the matter this afternoon, Bai said he was in the process of trying to make contact with Bromberg and declined to comment further on the matter in the meantime. We will update this post accordingly if and when we are provided with more information.

TechCrunch covered the news earlier today that Pebble, which participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort, raised $6.2 million in seed funding from YC itself alongside LightShed Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Montage Ventures, Soma Capital and angel investors.

On its website, Pebble, founded last year, calls itself “the first app that pays you to save, spend, and send your money — all in one balance.” It launched with two core products — a 5% APY interest offering for customer cash deposits, and a 5% cash back offering when customers spend at its partner merchants, which include Uber, Amazon and Chipotle, Pebble CEO Aaron Bai said. The former product is based on the model of taking in customer funds, converting them to stablecoins, and lending them out to institutions, Bai explained at the time.

Bromberg subsequently told TechCrunch that both core products were based on two of Eco’s core offerings. Eco describes itself on its website as “one simple balance that lets you spend, send, save and make money.” Eco, which was founded in 2018 and has raised over $95 million from investors, including Activant Capital, L Catterton, Lightspeed Venture Partners and to a16z, to date, has been offering up to 5% yields on customer deposits and 5% cash back through its app since inception, TechCrunch reported last March. Bromberg said that while its yield product has temporarily paused lending stablecoins due to current market conditions, its offering has historically been based on doing just that.

“It’s just gotten so egregious at this point that we feel the need to call it out and point out that, everyone at the end of the day, everyone takes inspiration from other companies. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, and all of that’s true, but at some point, it’s just unconscionable to copy so brazenly. And if they want to talk, I’m super happy to talk to them. But I don’t really feel like going and reaching out to them in advance of making some public statements at this juncture,” Bromberg told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

Bromberg’s Twitter thread includes alleged screenshots of internal customer records, which he says show multiple attempts on behalf of the Pebble co-founders to gain access to Eco. Bromberg told TechCrunch that Eco was able to link these submissions to Bai and Phadnis because they were “repeated submissions with overlapping information,” such as the same phone number and email being used numerous times under different names, including Bromberg’s own name as well as “Andy Bro Burger” and “Poopy Bromberg.”

Bromberg also alleges that while Eco was onboarding Phadnis as a beta customer, Phadnis inquired in detail about Eco’s costs and technology, saying he was a computer science geek interested in backend operations. Bromberg attached what he says are screenshots of conversation transcripts with Phadnis, who was a student at UC Berkeley at the time, asking if Eco was offering internships and saying he was considering applying for a job at Eco. Those conversations, Bromberg claims, took place in September 2021 — two months after Phadnis launched Pebble.

Using the phone number Eco originally had on file for Phadnis, Bromberg says, Phadnis started an account under the name “Sam Johnson” and submitted what Eco’s systems detected to be fraudulent identity documentation.

Bromberg listed in one tweet the various components of Eco’s business he claims Pebble copied:

“Investors got duped by copycats who can’t create anything on their own. I don’t think investors knew those ideas and words weren’t original,” Bromberg added in the thread.

Bromberg told TechCrunch that Eco has no plans of pursuing legal action against Pebble at this time.

Another U.S. investor — Activant Capital – is opening an office in Europe as the continent heats up

Earlier this week, we caught up with Steve Sarracino the founder of the growth-equity firm Activant Capital in Greenwich, Conn., We’d last talked with Sarracino back in early April of last year, as people around the world were being forced into their homes by the pandemic, and his firm was just closing its third fund with $257 million in capital commitments.

As we learned, Activant, which tends to invest in e-commerce infrastructure and payments companies, is now (according to an SEC filing), nearing a close on a fourth fund that has targeted $425 million. It has — like a growing number of other U.S. firms — also opened a new office in Berlin, headed by Max Mayer, a former investor with Global Founders Capital.

We talked a bit about Activant’s growing interest in Europe and what underlies it. We also talked about the velocity of deal-making right now and what Sarracino makes of one of the hottest trends of the year: the many roll-ups of third-party sellers on Amazon. Excerpts from that conversation follow, edited lightly for length.

TC: How long have you been investing in Europe?

SS: A long time. We’d invested in Hybris [an e-commerce company that was acquired by SAP in 2013 for $1.5 billion]. We’re also investors in NewMarket [a six-year-old, Berlin- and Boston-based SaaS company that was founded by serial entrepreneur Stephan Schambach, who also founded Demandware].

We go back and forth to London all the time; it’s easy from the East Coast. But the continent is a different story. You really need to have a presence on the ground there.

TC: Why make the move now?

SS: There was always a lot of technical talent there — I think there are two times the number of STEM graduates in Europe as in the U.S. The challenge before was that the venture community was smaller — it takes a vibrant early-stage community to create later-stage opportunities. Europe was also missing middle management. In L.A. or New York or Boston, you can pull strong SVPs or even C-level execs out of Facebook and Amazon, but there wasn’t the same level of big companies there, and that has changed. They’re all [in Europe] now. So you’ve now got the technical talent, [sufficient] venture [dollars] and management.

TC: Are there other advantages? Are valuations any better in Europe or is Tiger Global driving up the numbers there, too?

SS: For the best companies, you don’t see much difference in valuation across continent. But the opportunity in Europe is attractive in the middle stage. Seed and A is pretty well covered, but B,C,D, and E is a very different game.

Another amazing thing about Europe is that while you do have to spend a little more on marketing, sales, and product because you have to be multi-lingual, you have to deal with different tax jurisdictions, you have to sell differently in different countries, European startups as a result are purpose-built to go global much faster versus U.S. companies. [In the U.S.], you have one giant market and you might pop into the UK and Canada, but it’s a very different proposition to go global.

TC: Do the European companies you talk with feel the need to establish a presence in the U.S. as soon as possible, or has that changed, too?

SS:  In some areas, for example, where cloud adoption is behind in Europe versus the U.S., you can get hypergrowth in Europe. So it’s not a requirement or prerequisite to expand into the U.S. But, of course, it’s on the roadmap for anyone in the tech business.

TC: How do you think about companies that could conceivably become rivals with your U.S. investments down the road?

SS: We’re careful about investing in the same company but in different geographies because our belief is that they can compete globally, so we try and pick the global winner. If it’s a micro geo — let’s say it’s a company that sells SMB infrastructure software in Germany and won’t get to the US, we wouldn’t have trouble backing [a similar company in the U.S.], but that’s something you have to pay close attention to, because we are on the board and we are active.

Our funds are fairly concentrated. In our third fund, we only have six assets. With this new fund, we’ll have 10 to 12 partnerships at most. So it’s a little easier to manage.

TC: How can anyone invest in a market that’s moving this fast? We reporters see a lot of deals and they look so much alike at this point that it’s dizzying. It must be exponentially worse for you.

SS: Things are moving fast and they’re expensive. Tiger and bigger firms have shifted the market. But there are still great opportunities in the mid-stages. Our overall philosophy is that, first, you want to find the startup that’s doing something different or doing something that no one has done in a long time. You also have to distinguish between a feature and a platform. Can this startup build out a real platform and acquire different types of customers? Third, you’ve got to know these sectors much better now than ever before, because, to your point, there are 15 companies doing the same thing these days, and to have that level of conviction, you have to meet with all 15 and pick what you think is the winning horse based on where the market is going, the quality of the team, and the quality of the product they can build.

In some ways it’s harder to differentiate, and there are a few ways to react to that. The way we react is to retrench to our core sectors that we know well and say no to a lot of stuff that seems really amazing but we’re just not going to get up to speed fast enough given the velocity of the market.

TC: How do you determine whether a startup is working on a feature versus a platform?

SS: It’s a real issue because there are a lot of great feature companies that can get to some scale pretty fast — $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, $40 million in revenue. But making that next step is hard. Companies with real network effects — meaning that every customer they add, there’s some benefit to the other customers — [can be] any sort of of two-sided marketplace, [it can be] embedded payments, [but there has to be] some other level of ‘value add’ besides selling simple software.

That’s also seeing more companies charging transactionally versus [a flat subscription rate]. I think that’s going to be a big trend over the next three years — this move away from SaaS to charging along the lines of what the customers cares about. When you charge the way the customer views their revenue, the product has to be very good and very differentiated.

TC: You’ve talked with me before about funding companies that help SMBs avoid getting hollowed out by Amazon. Just wondering what you make of these many roll-ups of third-party sellers on Amazon we’re seeing in the U.S. and Europe and suddenly in Asia, too.

SS: Oh, gosh. So they’re basically finding really neat products, buying them for cheap multiples of EBITDA, and then driving better advertising, visibility, and reviews on Amazon to get more buyers driving up EBITDA. It’s a brilliant play, but I’ve had my face ripped off a few times, and one [instance owed to there being] a single point of failure, so as Amazon shifts things, I think that introduces risk.

There are some really interesting assets out there. It’s just not what we do. I also think there was some Covid bump, because people were at home and not spending money on travel, so you saw spending shift away from services and experiences and into goods and products and I think that’s going to shift back quickly to experiences. So we’ll see what happens post COVID with some of these, but it’s going to be get the same kind of overarching growth that drove some of the underlying products. There’s  also a question about how much technology they’re really applying versus, is it more of a deal business. That’s unclear, but, I mean, some of them have raised like half a billion dollars so they got it, they’re doing something right.

Eco raises $26M in a16z-led round to scale its digital cryptocurrency platform

‍Eco, which has built out a digital global cryptocurrency platform, announced Friday that it has raised $26 million in a funding round led by a16z Crypto.

Founded in 2018, the SF-based startup’s platform is designed to be used as a payment tool around the world for daily-use transactions. The company emphasizes that it’s “not a bank, checking account, or credit card.”

“We’re building something better than all of those combined,” it said in a blog post. The company’s mission has also been described as an effort to use cryptocurrency as a way “to marry savings and spending,” according to this CoinList article.

Eco users can earn up to 5% annually on their deposits and get 5% cashback on when transacting with merchants such as Amazon, Uber, and others. Next up: the company says it will give its users the ability to pay bills, pay friends and more “all from the same, single wallet.” That same wallet, it says, rewards people every time they spend or save.

After a “successful” alpha test with millions of dollars deposited, the company’s Eco App is now available to the public.

A slew of other VC firms participated in Eco’s latest financing, including Founders Fund, Activant Capital, Slow Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Tribe Capital, Valor Capital Group, and more than one hundred other funds and angels.  Expa and Pantera Capital co-led the company’s $8.5 million funding round.

CoinList co-founder Andy Bromberg stepped down from his role last fall to head up Eco. The startup was originally called Beam before rebranding to Eco “thanks to involvement by founding advisor, Garrett Camp, who held the Eco brand,” according to Coindesk. Camp is an Uber co-founder and Expa is his venture fund.

For a16z Crypto, leading the round is in line with its mission.

In a blog post co-written by Katie Haun and Arianna Simpson, the firm outlined why it’s pumped about Eco and its plans.

“One of the challenges in any new industry — crypto being no exception — is building things that are not just cool for the sake of cool, but that manage to reach and delight a broad set of users,” they wrote. “Technology is at its best when it’s improving the lives of people in tangible, concrete ways…At a16z Crypto, we are constantly on the lookout for paths to get cryptocurrency into the hands of the next billion people. How do we think that will happen? By helping them achieve what they already want to do: spend, save, and make money — and by focusing users on tangible benefits, not on the underlying technology.”

Eco is not the only crypto platform offering rewards to users. Lolli gives users free bitcoin or cash when they shop at over 1,000 top stores.

Eco raises $26M in a16z-led round to scale its digital cryptocurrency platform

‍Eco, which has built out a digital global cryptocurrency platform, announced Friday that it has raised $26 million in a funding round led by a16z Crypto.

Founded in 2018, the SF-based startup’s platform is designed to be used as a payment tool around the world for daily-use transactions. The company emphasizes that it’s “not a bank, checking account, or credit card.”

“We’re building something better than all of those combined,” it said in a blog post. The company’s mission has also been described as an effort to use cryptocurrency as a way “to marry savings and spending,” according to this CoinList article.

Eco users can earn up to 5% annually on their deposits and get 5% cashback on when transacting with merchants such as Amazon, Uber, and others. Next up: the company says it will give its users the ability to pay bills, pay friends and more “all from the same, single wallet.” That same wallet, it says, rewards people every time they spend or save.

After a “successful” alpha test with millions of dollars deposited, the company’s Eco App is now available to the public.

A slew of other VC firms participated in Eco’s latest financing, including Founders Fund, Activant Capital, Slow Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Tribe Capital, Valor Capital Group, and more than one hundred other funds and angels.  Expa and Pantera Capital co-led the company’s $8.5 million funding round.

CoinList co-founder Andy Bromberg stepped down from his role last fall to head up Eco. The startup was originally called Beam before rebranding to Eco “thanks to involvement by founding advisor, Garrett Camp, who held the Eco brand,” according to Coindesk. Camp is an Uber co-founder and Expa is his venture fund.

For a16z Crypto, leading the round is in line with its mission.

In a blog post co-written by Katie Haun and Arianna Simpson, the firm outlined why it’s pumped about Eco and its plans.

“One of the challenges in any new industry — crypto being no exception — is building things that are not just cool for the sake of cool, but that manage to reach and delight a broad set of users,” they wrote. “Technology is at its best when it’s improving the lives of people in tangible, concrete ways…At a16z Crypto, we are constantly on the lookout for paths to get cryptocurrency into the hands of the next billion people. How do we think that will happen? By helping them achieve what they already want to do: spend, save, and make money — and by focusing users on tangible benefits, not on the underlying technology.”

Eco is not the only crypto platform offering rewards to users. Lolli gives users free bitcoin or cash when they shop at over 1,000 top stores.

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is creating a new cryptocurrency

 Garrett Camp, best known for being a co-founder of Uber and founder of the accelerator/venture fund Expa, is launching his own cryptocurrency. The currency is called Eco, and Camp wants it to be a digital global currency that can be used as a payment tool around the world for daily-use transactions. There will be one trillion tokens issued initially, of which 50% will be given away to the… Read More