Executive Summary

Alex Jekowsky appeared on an April episode of “Verticals” to describe the journey and insights that built Cents, an integrated hardware and software platform now serving over 4,000 laundromats.

Alex Jekowsky entered entrepreneurship while still in college, creating Ulyngo, a marketplace and payments platform for universities. He left school to build the business and spent more than five years iterating through failures before selling Ulyngo to Modo Labs in 2019, at age 23. During the subsequent earnout, Jekowsky began examining laundromats—not initially as a technology opportunity, but as a potentially attractive, cash-generative small business to purchase.

Instead, he discovered an industry with an extraordinary technology gap: approximately 70–80% of laundromats were still coin-operated. That observation led to Cents, an integrated software, payments and hardware platform. Jekowsky eventually committed full-time after Bessemer invested in 2021. By April 2026, Cents served more than 4,500 locations, processed over $1 billion of payments annually and had raised a $140 million Series C, described as the largest technology investment in the laundry vertical. The round reportedly included $110 million of primary capital and a $30 million secondary tender.

Alex’s Key Takeaways…