Bio
Alex Jekowsky is the co-founder and CEO of Cents (trycents.com), a New York-based vertical SaaS company serving the laundry industry. Jekowsky grew up in Tiburon in Marin County, California, and was approximately 23 years old in 2019 when he began building Cents. Before founding Cents, he built and sold Ulingo, a payment system for college campuses that facilitated peer-to-peer transactions, student life organization finance, and meal plans for large and small universities. Ulingo was acquired by Motolabs, described as a leading mobile application infrastructure provider for no-code app development, and Jekowsky joined Motolabs as Senior Director of Commerce to run their Motolabs Marketplace strategy. During his earnout period at Motolabs, Jekowsky began exploring the purchase of laundromats, going as far as signing letters of intent on three locations. He ultimately decided to build technology for laundromat operators rather than own stores, recognizing that the industry lacked any venture-backed or institutional-grade software infrastructure. He wrote the first lines of code for Cents around 2019 and went full time on the business around October or November 2020. Under Jekowsky's leadership, Cents grew from approximately $700,000 in revenue in 2021 to $3 million, $6 million, $36 million, and $60 million in the years through 2025, with roughly 80 employees at the end of 2025 and a 99% customer retention rate. The company operates above a 20% EBITDA margin and processes approximately $140 million in payments per month. In 2024, Cents completed an acquisition to accelerate hardware growth. Cents closed a $140 million Series C led by Sumeru Equity Partners, comprising a $110 million primary round and a $30 million employee tender offer, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Camber Creek also at the table. The company powers nearly 7,000 apartment buildings and shared laundry facilities and has approximately 200,000 to 250,000 hardware devices installed in the field.