A tech startup that moved its home base to Cincinnati amid the Covid-19 pandemic plans to more than double its team in the Queen City in 2022 with the addition of roughly a dozen new high-paying jobs.
Rumby, which has developed an e-commerce platform that takes dry cleaners and laundromats online, is expanding its Cincinnati team. The startup is looking to fill 10-15 salaried positions spanning software development, front end sales and administrative support. If filled, the jobs would add more than $1.125 million in annual payroll.
Founder Ben Cantey said the company is seeing “enormous traction” with its new business-to-business, or B2B platform, called Rumby Exchange. Rumby Exchange connects hotels, commercial buildings, apartments and condominiums to independent dry cleaners for customer laundry, dry cleaning, shoe repair and alterations.
Cantey has been intentional about growing Rumby’s talent base locally since moving the company — and himself — from Los Angeles to Cincinnati. He's also an angel investor in the Cincinnati startup scene.
“There’s a lot of excitement and new stuff happening, and there’s some really great tech talent here,” he told me in an interview last year.” It will be nice to put another company on the map here in Cincinnati, to log another success story for the city.”
Rumby is Cantey’s sixth startup and fourth tech venture. Cleaners and laundromats, he said, are one of the last brick-and-mortar verticals to be disrupted by tech. The Springfield Township native founded the company in January 2020 and has raised a small amount of capital to date, including a $1.25 million seed round from Chicago’s M25.
Nearly 60 different hotel properties currently use Rumby Exchange including hotels carrying the Marriott, Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton brands in cities such as Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C.
Rumby also offers a separate product for individual customers to place orders for laundry and dry-cleaning pickup and rapid service through the Rumby website.
Rumby utilizes existing driver networks like Uber and Postmates to get orders picked up and delivered. The company generates revenue by taking a small percentage of every order it processes online.
“The future is pickup and delivery,” Cantey said. “There are some competitors, and there are quite few startups in the laundry and dry cleaning graveyard, when (companies) made a push to Uberize everything, but our approach is very different.”
The company is looking to hire two junior front-end developers for $75,000 annually; two full stack RoR (Ruby on Rails) developers at $120,000 annually; and a chief technology officer at $180,000 annually. It also wants to fill five business development positions, which would pay $65,000 annually plus commission; three customer/client support positions at $55,000 annually plus bonuses; and one executive assistant for $65,000 per year.
The positions include full health, dental and eye insurance along with unlimited paid time off. Employees can work from home with flexibility to come into the office as desired.
Rumby is headquartered at Over-the-Rhine’s Union Hall.
