In a recent article published on November 1, 2025, Yahoo Finance featured Laundryheap CEO Deyan Dimitrov and the growth of Laundryheap. Read the full feature below.
It was an early evening in 2014 that changed the course of Deyan Dimitrov’s career. Urgently needing a suit dry cleaned, he found his local laundrette in east London closed for the day.
Dimitrov, thanks to his finance and tech background, conceived an on-demand laundry service which today sees his company Laundryheap collect, clean and deliver clothes to customers — who can track their items — with a 24-hour turnaround. The business is anticipating revenues of £27m this year.
“A majority of the market is still operated in the traditional way,” says Laundryheap’s CEO and co-founder. “It is manual and inefficient and it could take five days for a shirt. The more I dug deeper the more I realised a better customer experience could be created.
“Everyone in the world needs to do laundry, it’s not something that is unique. It’s the number one hated chore to do at home and there was a big opportunity to fix that.”
Dimitrov met his co-founder Mayur Bommai, who was studying for a master’s in engineering business management at the University of Warwick, having posted for an intern position. He quickly became the first employee at the London-founded business.
“There was no [hierarchical] order,” says Dimitrov. “He believed in the project and in me and he was so critical in the early days of the business.”
The pair started from co-working WeWork’s first office after taking up an offer of several free months’ worth of space. “I thought that was ideal for a startup,” adds Dimitrov.
Laundryheap still has its headquarters in the UK, with around 170 staff across 13 countries and 24 cities. Over half of the firm’s revenue comes from the UK.
Dimitrov, 38, left Bulgaria for the first time as an 18-year-old when went to study in the Netherlands. He later undertook projects for German tech outfit Rocket Internet across Europe and has now visited over 50 countries.
“In finance, I experienced first hand the need for laundry and the need for suits and shirts,” he says. “When I worked in tech, I was travelling and laundry was always an issue. It was a complicated experience and I knew it was a big opportunity in this space to use technology to solve a problem.”
At the first dry cleaning shop the duo partnered with, they began to learn every facet of the laundry business and identify potential errors. One advantage the co-founders had was that washing machines were not being used at night. It meant being able to scale up on untapped capacity.
“I had this conviction and knew it would work,” reveals Dimitrov. “I didn’t know the solution but we worked hard on it, put the customer first, tried to understand where the challenges might come from and coming from outside the industry helped me question everything.”
Company revenue was around £4m before COVID hit. Despite the challenges of seeing their B2B business “drop to zero”, Laundryheap saw opportunity and its biggest expansion came in 2020.
“Before, when we were chatting to facilities in the US [on video call] they wanted to meet and we must have seemed like a dodgy company coming from the UK. During the pandemic it became an excuse not to meet people and in some ways it became easier for us.”
Laundryheap currently operates in London, Birmingham and Manchester, with a launch in Edinburgh to come, while the company has also expanded to Singapore, UAE and the US. To boost its Spanish-speaking territories, Laundryheap has also started in Peru — Lima is “great for tech startups,” says Dimitrov — and expanded to France in 2023.
In the last three years, Laundryheap has acquired six competitors, including on-demand rival Laundrapp in 2022. Meanwhile, partnerships with hotels have seen Laundryheap launch an overnight express service in London, which enables customers to have laundry collected by 10pm and delivered back by 8am. It’s billed as the fastest laundry service in the UK.
Dimitrov moved to Switzerland full-time with his family during COVID, while his co-founder’s UK visa expired during Brexit and left him returning to Bangalore, India. While waiting several months for it to be renewed, Bommai built a small team and now resides in the city overseeing over 100 staff and 24/7 operations.
“It’s helped us become an international company,” says Dimitrov, as Laundryheap continues to clean up the market.
CEO Says: Deyan Dimitrov on…
Start-up mentality
The challenge you have if you raise funding too early is pressure and having to show growth. Having bootstrapped, we were hands on and could come to product-market fit before we had rush for growth. It helped us solve the business model from the beginning before spending on marketing.
How to scale
With two people at the start, it requires you to be flexible, transparent and honest. Everything you are doing is against the odds and you need to keep early staff motivated, show the big picture and why we are doing it. It is more critical that everyone is fully on board. The challenge for me was how to keep the DNA in scaling and I think we have been successful because we have been genuine.
Customer first
We are implementing a change in our customer’s lifestyle. That’s what I am most proud of. Perhaps I didn’t see the full potential that people would see us as a life-changing experience. We aren’t just saving a trip to the dry cleaners, we are freeing time and customers find it easier to do it with us than use their washing machine.