Small business takeaway:
- Startup NoScrubs is disrupting the laundry industry with a scalable model that pairs gig workers with idle laundromat equipment, leveraging artificial intelligence for route optimization and real-time quality control. Its focus on efficiency, customer convenience, and integrating AI-driven logistics offers small businesses a blueprint for scaling operations, reducing costs, and meeting evolving consumer demands.
As the 20th employee at Instacart, Matt O’Connor launched the company’s Austin, Texas, market in 2014, writing the playbook for turning a $15 per order loss into a $4 profit within four months. By the time he departed Instacart in 2016, the company’s valuation had skyrocketed from $27 million to $2 billion.
O’Connor worked for delivery service Amazon Flex, then founded AdQuick, a tech platform that helps brands buy and measure out-of-home advertising. At the time in 2021, O’Connor, who disliked doing his laundry, sent his dirty clothes out to be washed, dried, and folded.
“But I was perplexed with how slow and expensive it was,” he said. It occurred to him that pairing gig workers with idle washing machines could make for a winning business model. That way, customers could potentially get their clean laundry delivered faster.
When he created a bare-bones website based on his idea, strangers signed up and paid him to pick up their laundry and wash it at a local laundromat.
“I saw there was customer demand,” O’Connor said. “Everybody has to do laundry. Then the thought was, ‘How do I scale this nationally?’” O’Connor leaned on his Instacart experience as he built out his business model and began to partner with laundromats nationwide.
“People take it for granted that they have to spend two to three years over their lifetime doing laundry,” he said. “This is a huge market, and there hasn’t been a household name in the [laundry delivery] space, whereas there is one in both grocery and food delivery.”
Now, O’Connor is the Founder and CEO of laundry disruptor NoScrubs, which hires gig work “scrubbers” to pick up dirty clothes from customers and launder and fold them at the closest laundromat. The laundry delivery service has raised over $4 million toward the goal of cutting down on the number of years people spend doing laundry, and its service is available in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
NoScrubs operates within the U.S. online laundry services market, which Grand View Research projects will surge from an estimated $8.28 billion to more than $57 billion by 2030, fueled by busy urban households, dual-income families, and younger consumers who are increasingly embracing app-based laundry services.
[Read more: How the New Era of AI Will Impact Consumer-Driven Companies Large and Small in 2026]
Like Instacart, DoorDash, or Uber, NoScrubs is another way for people to make money during their free time.
By testing the laundry service himself, NoScrubs’ Founder built a scalable model designed to turn small local demand into national growth
O’Connor carefully developed his idea into a fully formed plan he believed had strong potential for success. He met his co-founder, software engineer Sudhanshu “Su” Gautam, through the co-founder at his previous company. Drawing on the network he’d built while fundraising for AdQuick, O’Connor pitched his idea to potential investors, using those connections to secure early support.
By 2024, he was ready to launch. Initially, O’Connor himself headed up the washing, drying, and folding. “I saw it through end to end, I saw how much time it took and how much it cost. Seeing it firsthand was a helpful experience.”
Now, over a year later, NoScrubs has thousands of customers, it partners with a network of 40 laundromats across six metro areas, and it’s built an app for scrubbers and a more sophisticated website. Laundry is washed and delivered within a three to four-hour window versus double digits for some competitors, he says. In 2025, NoScrubs’ first full year of operations, the brand grew eightfold, said O’Connor, and in aggregate, it saved customers six years of their time.
Part of the brand’s success, O’Connor said, was taking the time to study competitors’ models and determine ways to cut time and cost out of the online laundry delivery model. Many laundry service competitors first bring clothes to a single depot before handing them off to third-party vendors, making for more touchpoints and higher costs of additional drivers and gas.
“And the last mile is basically everything,” O’Connor said. “Our model minimizes the last mile from the get-go, with benefits for both the customer and for the scrubber.”
Like Instacart, DoorDash, or Uber, NoScrubs is another way for people to make money during their free time, too, with a flexible schedule and minimal driving. “And with us, no one else has to be in your car, and there’s really minimal driving. People like that a lot.” Scrubbers make on average $3,000 to $4,000 per month, O’Connor said.
Tapping real-time AI workflow tools and a network of ‘scrubbers’ streamlines laundry pickup, cleaning, and the delivery process
Helping to drive the company’s growth, O’Connor and his team have raised a total of $4.2 million from Initialized Capital and Frontier Ventures. Investors’ interest was piqued after the company grew at a rate of around 149 times its first-month volume over the previous 17 months, he said.
Recently, NoScrubs integrated AI support assistance into its workflow. AI helps scrubbers optimize routes and provides real-time feedback on laundry quality, reducing errors and inefficiencies after analyzing intake videos scrubbers make. “If something is poorly packed or folded, the scrubber gets feedback in real time,” said O’Connor.
The company is also experimenting with autonomous delivery and robotics, which will hopefully translate into less driving for scrubbers and enhanced efficiency as robots assist in folding laundry. O’Connor hopes to pilot a folding robot later this year to gauge effectiveness.
“We don’t need a robot to be at 100%,” he said. “It can be a complement to drive efficiency versus having to be ready for full prime time. I do think that these types of robots will be adopted more by businesses than consumers at first.”
To further impact efficiency, NoScrubs is in talks with sidewalk and road delivery robot companies, including Coco Robotics, Serve Robotics, and Pinkbot, to get pilots up and running.
Meanwhile, initial data show that half of the company’s customers live in homes and half in apartments. That’s a good sign for growth, O’Connor said, because “what it shows is that you’re not just using us if you don’t have your own equipment. Half of customers just don’t want to do laundry.” Encouraged by that, the brand will continue to expand.
O’Connor’s goal is for NoScrubs to ultimately serve customers in 100 U.S. markets. By the end of 2026, it will be making its way to the Midwest, focused on cities with a population over 200,000.
“The underlying problem we’re solving exists globally,” said O’Connor. “We have a long way to go in the U.S., but there’s no reason we couldn’t operate internationally as well,” he said. “And once we scale everywhere, it will be borderline irrational to do your own laundry. A lot of people will choose to outsource it.”
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