Mumbai based Laundry services startup Doormint closes shop in Bangalore and Gurgaon

Laundry services startup Doormint founded in 2014 by three IIT alumni Abhinav Agarwal,  Naman Lahoty, and Piyush Ranjan shuts down its operation in some parts of Bangalore and Gurgaon.

They initially started this venture to organize the home services sector by providing on-demand electrician, plumber, carpenter, electronic appliance repair and pest control. Later in 2015 they decided to to look only into the laundry sector by providing Dry Cleaning, Wash and Iron, Wash and Fold, Steam Ironing, Express Service, etc to its users.

In April 2015 Doormint raised Rs 60 Lakhs seed fund from  Powai Lake Ventures and later raised $3 Million in Series A from Helion Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital. This shows that this is a well funded company for a 100+ employees. Their aim is to use technology for solving laundry problem such as negotiating, tracking and timely delivery.

Couple of challenges that the team faced was

• Ensuring services providers that they are not competition, but partners
• Convincing customers to try their services
• Ensuring quality while scaling up

According to a couple of reports, the Indian Laundry Industry is estimated at INR 2,20,000 Cr, of which the unorganised market (dhobis, maid servants, and mom-and-pop stores) valued at INR 5,000 Cr. The sector is fragmented with 7,67,000 establishments, 98% of which are micro-sized laundries with fewer than 10 workers. The organised segment comprises a mere 2-3% of the entire laundry market in India.

The reason for their shut down is not yet clear. The team told the media that they are still in the process of shutting down, but the website operations speak otherwise.

Any industry that has logistics involved is a tricky one. We have seen many startups that shut down due to high expenses incurred from logistics.  We will soon know the exact reason of this startup shutdown.

Read about Hyderabad based Laundry Startup PKC

Also read Why Startups Shutdown