Jabong’s founders Pravin Sinha and Arun Chandra Mohan have invested in Wassup — an online laundry services start-up, based out of Bengaluru, owned by Laundry Projects.
Sinha and Mohan have invested an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round of funding which totals up to $2 million (R12.6 crore), and has a clutch of other investors. “This is not a social service we are doing. Apart from Jabong, we want to set up more ventures, which we cannot do it alone. So, we would like to invest in businesses which we believe is scalable,” said Sinha.
Neither of the Jabong founders will join the Wassup board, but will help in building the business operationally. “In this business, execution is critical. We will be doing many pilots and expand in many more cities. Pravin and Arun will help us in building the operational execution,” said Durga Das, co-founder and managing director of Wassup.
Laundry service and dry-cleaning in India is 95% unorganised, which is valued at R2,00,000 crore. After travel, retail and food businesses getting traction, Singh believes that convenience services is the next big thing in online, and that is where his bets are.
This is not the first time that the Jabong founders have invested in early stage start-ups. Sinha invested in Tryst — an online dating app. He has also invested in his wife’s online art start-up Aasha Art, Zimmba — a home services company, Aquabrim — an automatic water-level detector. There are three more small start-ups that he has put his money into, one being a medical services company and another one is a social media venture. He does not disclose their names.
Sinha believes that fixed deposits is for short term benefits, but investing in start-ups is a long term return-on-investment game. “We are not in hurry to exit. I am comfortable if my ROI is protect. I can even stay invested for 15 years,” he said.
Wassup already has set up an aggregating hub of 30 pickup points. In the next six months 30 such hubs will be set up. “Eventually the service will go to tier-II and tier-III towns. We will expand in five cities in the next 10-12 months, and then branch out to 20 cities,” said Balachandar R, co-founder and CEO of Wassup. In the next five years the idea is to offer the service in 100 cities.
The $2-million funding is just precedes the larger funding that Wassup is looking at. “We will raise $10-12 million in the next one year. This funding will pave way to the larger fund raising,” said Wassup’s Das. Laundry Project’s other ventures are Luxure, which does premium bespoke dry cleaning, Sparrow which is into shoe care.
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