Housejoy acquires on-demand laundry startup MyWash

Amazon-backed Housejoy has acquired on-demand laundry startup Mywash for an undisclosed amount. According to YourStory sources, the deal involves only stock (no cash) and looks like an acqui-hire rather than an acquisition. Following the acquisition, MyWash's core team will be joining Housejoy and aims to scale to 10,000 services on a daily basis over the next year for the laundry vertical.

Talking about the acquisition, Saran Chatterjee, CEO at Housejoy, said:

The MyWash team is a super smart team and has demonstrated the best operational know how to scale laundry. We couldn't be more excited about the possibilities. We now have the possibility to accelerate the growth in laundry beyond the current growth rate.

Founded by BITS Pilani graduates Silus Reddy, Chintapalli, Raghu Bharat and Balaji Ashok in 2014, Mywash had secured a seed round from Orios Venture. Raghu Bharat, Co-Founder at MyWash, said:

We see a lot of synergy between MyWash and Housejoy. This is the best opportunity for the team to scale our vision of being the number 1 Laundry player in the country.

Unlike horizontal service marketplaces, vertical focused platforms are finding it difficult to attract VC's interest. Last year over a dozen startups focused on different verticals had snapped up angel funding but many failed to capture interest of VCs.

YourStory take

According to a recent report by KPMG, the organised laundry market in India is estimated to be around Rs 5,000 crore while the unorganised one is estimated to be around Rs 2,00,000 crores. Despite the big market, startups in on-demand laundry have been going through a tough time for a while.

MyWash was trying to raise follow-on round for over six months, according to YourStory sources, but it didn’t work out. The company has not confirmed this. Besides laundry,consolidation is expected in other on-demand verticals like beauty, driver and home services.