5 on Funding with Nishant Jain, Co-founder and CEO of Presso

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About Presso:

Company Description: Presso is an Atlanta-based, AI-robotics company harnessing the power of technology to create the first line of on-demand, low-carbon, express garment care machines. Their category-leading Eco-Robotic Presso machine reduces the carbon footprint of traditional clothing care by up to 93%. 

Industry: Climate tech

Amount Raised: $8m

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: Growing the team and the product capabilities to meet the demand

1. Capitalizing on media coverage to expand to new markets

“After the funding round announcement, we've enjoyed some wonderful press attention with TechCrunch and CNBC’s Clean Smart show. That has caused one of the strongest marketing pulls we’ve seen in the history of the company. We’re getting hundreds of orders every day for Presso robots everywhere from different markets. 

Our partnerships with hotels and multi-family industries have been very positive. But we've been most impressed with the overwhelming outreach we've received from laundromats. There is a very real pain point within this garment care industry that needs solving, and we think we're the best suited to assist with that solution, and so do the laundromat owners, providing an end-to-end solution in a single one-stop-shop for all types of garments. So we're looking with this funding to start working with some of these laundromat owners as well, experimenting with our technology in these new spaces that we've not yet experimented with.”  

2. Creating a new partner program with existing customer markets

“ With our core thesis with multi-family apartment buildings as well as hospitality, we have established a new founding partner program where we are looking to partner with visionaries in both of these industries. The goal of the program is to establish consumer awareness and love with Presso’s new standard of climate-positive clothing care in some of these luxury properties around the nation.”

3. Investing in research and development

“We keep investing in our R&D efforts to continue leveling up for cleaning and pressing performances — anywhere from improving our chemistry in our spraying technology and application method of our cleaning liquid, as well as the actual garment finishing, and any further automation that will add that much more value to our customers.”

4. Identifying and selecting new manufacturing partners

“Some of the funding will go towards assessing and selecting our future manufacturing partners next year to start producing hundreds of Presso machines. We are also looking to partner with third-party maintenance providers to scale our operations nationally. This is the year we're scaling nationally for the first time, and we're looking for some of these partners to ease the growing pains.” 

5. Build a team to match the demand

“Post-funding, we've already hired a top-notch head of sales and marketing, who is actually a successful previous startup founder who grew sales pipelines from scratch into millions of dollars. We've also hired a full-stack software engineer to support our maintenance dashboard to enable the scaling of our operations. We're also looking to hire 2 field technicians and a customer success manager to service our expanding fleet. We're also going to be looking for a seasoned mechanical engineer to support our design for manufacturing and an HR manager to support scaling our whole team.” 

About the Founder: Nishant Jain is the CEO and co-founder of Presso, an AI-robotics company that is revolutionizing the garment care industry. Nishant has a real estate background with a multi-generational family business in developing multifamily complexes, hotels, and commercial real estate in India. 

With a strong background in engineering and business, Nishant has previously cofounded on-demand software startups, served as a TPM at Lenze Corp and shipped autonomous robotics guidance systems, and published independent research in Clean Tech hardware.

Nishant holds a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering technology from Purdue University with a minor in computer science and entrepreneurship. In addition to his work at Presso, Nishant is actively involved in promoting and advising entrepreneurs in the tech community.