Marathon Laundry Machines

Laundry machines are the second-biggest users of energy in the home, and they're also the most complicated and least understood.

Marathon Laundry Machines is aiming to make them smart and energy-efficient.

This single machine both washes and dries laundry, and is internet-connected so it can negotiate rates with utilities and schedule laundry for energy-optimal times of day.

Doing laundry in a private home can be challenging enough.

But in a multi-tenant building with shared laundry resources, the contention for resources increases exponentially, and the status, scheduling, reservation, and management problem quickly becomes ripe for a cloud-based, data-driven solution.

Marathon has built an architecture starting with data-collecting sensors combined with state-of-the-art mobile and cloud solutions for tracking and managing not just the laundry, but the availability of machines, history of use, energy consumption, and true data-driven management.

The company has sold about $200,000 of the machines during its pre-sales process.

Wired Magazine said, “Marathon Laundry’s Washer-Dryer Is the Tesla of Appliances.”

And at CES 2016, Marathon Laundry Machine won Digital Trends Top Tech Award in Home Appliances.

The company's founder has worked for Steve Jobs three times, and has started and sold tech companies before.

Team Background

Glenn Reid - Founder & CEO

Glenn started Marathon to disrupt a $14B domestic industry — as he says, "it's time the Internet of Things and the Smart Home did something actually useful. We're on it."

He created the iMovie 1.0 at Apple in 1998 with a team of 3 people — ahead of schedule.

Then he built iPhoto 1.0 with a team of 5 people. He managed both products through 4 releases and tens of millions of users.

He is the primary inventor on a dozen or so Apple patents related to both of those products.

One of the first 25 people at Adobe Systems and wrote one of their seminal books, still in print 25 years later. Worked on applications, technologies, and many aspects of the business over many years, and have the unique honor of having worked at Adobe on three separate tours of duty, in 1985, in 1992, and again in 2006.

He has created and led several startup companies. As founding CEO of Five Across, Inc., he created a powerful networking platform with peer-to-peer, file sharing, instant messaging and social networking capabilities. It was acquired by Cisco in 2007.

At RightBrain Software, in the early 90's, he created the first object-oriented page layout application for NeXT computers, called PasteUp.

He earned his BS in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Co-Investors