Bucharest-based startup Vehicool washes your car right where it’s parked

With Vehicool, users can have their cars washed right where they’re parked, at home or the office, with almost no water at all. The mobile car wash service is currently available in Bucharest, but the two founders have big expansion plans that go beyond national borders.

The story of Vehicool started about a year and a half ago, in November 2019. Ionut Miftode (picture, right) and Alex Caplea (picture, left) were working at the same company back then, as computer programmers, and they came up with the idea during a lunch break.

“Ionut is the type of person who washes the car at least twice a week, and I was in the position of most of our customers - I didn’t like going to the car wash, waste my time for that,” Vehicool co-founder Alex Caplea told Romania-insider.com.

The idea started taking shape a month later, in December 2019, when Ionut wrote the first lines of code for the future Vehicool app. The project simply moved forward from there, with the two co-founders splitting their time between their regular jobs and their new project. And, after joining a startup accelerator and spending months trying to find the best ways to make their service (close to) perfect, Ionut and Alex decided to launch the app in October 2020.

“First of all, we wanted to make sure that, at least in theory, the idea can be applied. We got a lot of feedback from that accelerator, and only then, after about three months, we accelerated this process of forming a small team, identifying the right solutions, and developing the process. I think we already had 50 cars washed before actually launching the app. This way, we got a lot of feedback from customers - whether they were friends or other acquaintances -, and this helped us a lot to improve the whole experience,” Alex Caplea explained.

So far, Vehicool required total investments of around EUR 100,000 - an amount that includes both money invested in the business and its promotion and the two entrepreneurs’ work. And the co-founders continue to have talks with potential investors, planning to grow their startup further.

At present, Ionut and Alex are not only running the business. They also wash customers’ cars, together with two other agents. In April, the four-member team performed about 100 washes, but the goal is to grow the number to 1,000 washes/month by the end of the year. And, of course, add more members to the team. The target is to have 12 agents washing cars in Bucharest by the end of 2021. That would allow the two entrepreneurs to focus more on their big expansion plans.