AddVenture, a major Russian venture fund, has invested $500,000 into the Spanish same-day laundry and dry-cleaning online service MrJeff in exchange for a 10% stake in the company.
The news was reported by the Russian online publication Firrma.ru earlier this week.
Touted as “the laundry revolution,” this subscription-based service claims to have over 15,000 clients in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. The startup aims to save up to 40 hours monthly which the Spanish people spend doing their laundry.
Founded in 2015 and based in Valencia, the company is reportedly operating in Spain and the USA. Its website, however, has two languages: Spanish and Italian.
MrJeff, which has reportedly grown threefold for the past year, is planning to enter the Latin American market in the nearest future. The startup previously attracted a total of €2.3 million from undisclosed investors.
Last month, AddVenture took part in a €1.8 million funding round for Greek startup Douleutaras.gr, and invested $4.5 million in Russian home-cleaning service Qlean.
“We are solely focused on the market of home and local services, and we invest in this segment across the globe,” AddVenture Managing Partner Pavel Terentiev told us.
“This sector is huge — for instance, the US market is estimated to be around $1 trillion in annual spend. This translates into a global opportunity of well over $4 trillion. And while some of the industry leaders which emerged earlier on certain developed markets (US, UK) have proven they can be profitable, platforms in other regions still require capital to get to that point,” he explained.
AddVenture differentiates two businesses models there: horizontal marketplaces, which connect homeowners with service professionals for a variety of non-recurring services and / or complex projects; and specific vertical transactional platforms. These address customer needs that might be standardized, many of which may have a recurring nature, i.e. home cleaning or laundry services.
“We see a convergence between those model into a hybrid one that is effectively going to be a customer entry point for entire set of its home and personal needs,” Terentive added.
Source: Firrma.ru, CrunchBase.
