Chennai-based Dhobi G secures ₹1.5-crore funding from Indian Overseas Bank

Chennai-headquartered Dhobi G has secured a funding of ₹1.5 crore from Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) for its expansion plans.

“The funds will be utilised to develop laundry facilities in five more campuses, serving 7,500+ students in the next phase,” said Ravi Ranjan, founder and CEO of Dhobi G, which offers laundry services, primarily focusing on colleges and universities.

“We are looking at more colleges in Chennai. We are also venturing into the northern part of India. The Bengaluru and Coimbatore markets are also being looked at. In the next 12 months, we intend to serve over 20,000 students,” Mr. Ranjan told The Hindu.

Dhobi G was officially incubated on November 18, 2022, as part of Velocity Cohort 2, and welcomed its first customer, SRM University, in August 2023. The company was founded by three engineering students, who were classmates — Ravi Ranjan (founder and CEO), Ankur Gupta (co-founder and COO), and Daksh Sabharwal (co-founder and CMO).

Mr. Ranjan said: “Our first attempt was not Dhobi G as you see it today. We actually launched an e-commerce laundry app. At first, things looked good until one of our partner laundries started getting more than 10 orders a day. Then the complaints came flooding in. Late deliveries. Wrong clothes. Unhappy customers.”

“When we sat down with that partner, we found two big issues: unskilled workforce — no one was trained to handle volume or different fabrics and Secondly, unorganised systems — no tracking, no accountability, no process. That is when we realised — the problem is bigger than just getting orders. We tested, failed, and rebuilt until the system could run without chaos,” he noted.

So, while bootstrapping, Dhobi G built CILDC (Centre for Innovation in Laundry and Dry Cleaning) to train people, and LaundryOS to run laundry operations like clockwork. “Only after proving this model with SRM University did we raise ₹20 lakh from friends and family, followed by ₹25 lakh seed funding from NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore,” Mr. Rajan said.

When asked about the crowded laundry market with numerous existing players, he said: “The market is huge — ₹1.9 lakh crore — but institutional laundry is neglected. Colleges are still stuck with manual systems, untrained staff, and endless complaints. Students and administrators both want zero-CAPEX, tech-first, accountability-driven laundry.”

Responding to a query on water issues across regions, Mr. Ranjan said, “In India, water scarcity is not a future problem — it is already here. Our water-efficient machines save the equivalent of 570 municipal water tankers every year.”