A VC in Vacationland

Image via CrunchBase

According to VentureBeat, is the next big market in
local delivery your neighborhood dry cleaner? Delivery.com seems to
think so.

The merchant delivery company has acquired Brinkmat, a
service that lets people order laundry and dry cleaning services from local dry cleaners.

Launched last year,  New
York-based Brinkmat fits well into Delivery.com’s expansion beyond just food
delivery. Since its launch in 2004, the company has also started
delivering groceries, alcohol, and even flowers. Dry cleaning services,
then, are just a natural extension of that.

The move is also an interesting
counterpoint to the merger between
Grubhub and Seamless, two food delivery companies that are now
one big food delivery company. So as its competitors continue to bank on
food delivery, Delivery.com is expanding beyond it.

“Based just on our name, there’s
no reason we can’t be doing other things [besides food],” Delivery.com CEO
Jed Kleckner told me. ”The question we ask ourselves is this: What is
a category of merchants that is still low-tech, but can be made
frictionless by going online?”

That question led to
Delivery.com’s interest in the dry cleaning industry — and rightfully
so. There are roughly 22,000 dry cleaning businesses in the US,
and the industry represents roughly $8 billion in annual revenue, according to
Pell Research. While tiny on a neighborhood scale, dry cleaning is still
a pretty significant industry.

Terms of the deal were not
disclosed, but Delivery.com did note that Brinkmat founders Tim
O’Malley and Jay Winters will be joining the company’s tech team.