Miami has racked up another tech first.
Hamperapp, an online platform for laundry pickup and delivery, has become the first Miami area company accepted into the Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures (MSISV) program, a five-month accelerator that features mentorship and a $250,000 investment in each participating startup.
Financial giant Morgan Stanley confirmed Hamperapp was one of 33 early-stage innovators from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa selected from thousands of applicants for its 2025 program that just began. The venture and its peers will present at a global showcase and demo day in February to potential investors. No other company incorporated in Miami has been chosen for the initiative that Morgan Stanley began in 2017.
“We are proud to back this global cohort of changemakers that are delivering scalable solutions to a range of pressing business and societal challenges,” Jessica Alsford, Morgan Stanley Chief Sustainability Officer, said in a news release.
The selection is the latest among successes for Hamperapp, which began humbly in 2017 when co-founder Alejandro Chang sought to help his family laundry’s business gain clientele online. The venture now works with some 60 partners in 12 states, receiving a cut of the bill from laundry services provided as well as a fee from app customers. Transactions handled last year topped $3 million, says fellow co-founder and CEO Jorge Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said he first heard about the MSISV program during a panel at the South by Southwest tech and cultural festival in Austin, Texas. He later met someone from the program at the eMerge Americas tech conference in Miami Beach.
Acceptance means far more than a $250,000 cash infusion. “This will give us lots of exposure. We’ll be going to New York two to three days a month for the accelerator program, and we’ll have access to Morgan Stanley’s team to help us connect with their network,” said Rodriguez. “Then, in February on demo day, we’ll present to more than 400 investors.”
Hamperapp in 2024 took part in Northeastern University’s Miami Innovation Academy, an 8-week program for select entrepreneurs featuring workshops, mentorship, and access to Northeastern’s startup and capital-markets ecosystem to help their ventures scale. In 2023, at the eMerge pitch competition in Miami Beach, the company advanced past the first round to the top 25 among 100 companies selected to participate.
Morgan Stanley’s MSISV program builds on two earlier accelerator programs: its Inclusive Ventures Group and Sustainable Solutions Collaborative initiatives. Those legacy programs have distributed more than $30 million in capital to 130-plus startups and organizations in the past eight years.
Hamperapp has mainly bootstrapped for its funding to date, raising some $500,000 from founders, friends and family. The venture is already profitable, Rodriguez said.
With Morgan Stanley’s investment, the company plans to add partners to its platform representing some 2,000 laundries and drycleaners, businesses now on its waiting list. It also expects to hire more staff, Rodriguez told RefreshMiami.com: “So, we are putting the new capital to work.”
Later, Hamperapp also may expand to related cleaning services such as rugs, shoes and sneakers, said Chief Growth Officer Chang. The aim, Rodriguez said, is “to be a marketplace to empower laundromats with underutilized capacity” to better connect with customers.
Pictured above: Hamperapp co-founders Jorge Rodriguez, CEO, and Alejandro Chang, Chief Growth Officer.
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Source: refreshmiami.com
