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Is the next big market in local delivery your neighborhood dry cleaner? Delivery.com seems to think so.
The merchant delivery company has acquired Brinkmat, a service that lets people order laundry and dry cleaning services from local dry cleaners.
Launched last year, New York-based Brinkmat fits well into Delivery.com’s expansion beyond just food delivery. Since its launch in 2004, the company has also started delivering groceries, alcohol, and even flowers. Dry cleaning services, then, are just a natural extension of that.
The move is also an interesting counterpoint to the merger between Grubhub and Seamless, two food delivery companies that are now one big food delivery company. So as its competitors continue to bank on food delivery, Delivery.com is expanding beyond it.
“Based just on our name, there’s no reason we can’t be doing other things [besides food],” Delivery.com CEO Jed Kleckner told me. “The question we ask ourselves is this: What is a category of merchants that is still low-tech, but can be made frictionless by going online?”
That question led to Delivery.com’s interest in the dry cleaning industry — and rightfully so. There are roughly 22,000 dry cleaning businesses in the US, and the industry represents roughly $8 billion in annual revenue, according to Pell Research. While tiny on a neighborhood scale, dry cleaning is still a pretty significant industry.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Delivery.com did note that Brinkmat founders Tim O’Malley and Jay Winters will be joining the company’s tech team.
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