With all the plastic and paper covering the things we buy, more and more consumers are seeking out companies that operate more sustainably.
EcoCart has built an infrastructure for e-commerce companies and works with them to make that shopping experience more transparent and sustainable. Here’s how it works: The three-year-old software company performs product life cycle audits for its customers to help them calculate, analyze and offset their carbon emissions.
Customers can then see how that company is doing in terms of protecting trees and using clean energy sources while companies can offer offsetting initiatives within its shopping experience — for example, providing a way for them to make carbon-neutral purchases or showing the number of trees saved from an order.
“Consumers are looking for ways to shop sustainably, but brands don’t have a great way of being able to communicate that to their customers or execute on that in an inexpensive, easy-to-understand way, and that’s all the things that we help with,” EcoCart co-founder Dane Baker told TechCrunch.
Baker and Peter Twomey started the company about three and a half years ago and launched its product about two years ago. When we last profiled the San Francisco–based company in 2021, it had raised $3 million in seed funding and was working with 500 customers.
EcoCart co-founders Dane Baker and Peter Twomey. Image Credits: EcoCart
EcoCart is now back, having raised $14.15 million in Series A dollars and boasts over 2,000 brands as customers, including Siete Foods, Supergoop! and Bird scooters. It also increased revenue more than 8x and grew headcount from 5 to over 30 employees.
“We raised the Series A to support the demand from our customers, especially as we move up market to support larger retailers like Walmart,” Twomey told TechCrunch.
The new investment was led by Fifth Wall Climate with participation from Capital One Ventures, SVB Capital, Ryder Ventures, Sephora CTO Sree Sreedhararaj, Instacart’s head of product Nikila Srinivasan and a group of other angel investors. Existing investors Base10 Partners, SuperAngel.Fund and Ben Jabbawy, founder of Privy, also participated.
Rexhi Dollaku, partner at Base10 Partners, said that doubling down on its investment into EcoCart was the result of seeing how the sales process has changed, is digitizing and leaning into climate.
“EcoCart was a perfect fit into these megatrends that we think are going to be really impactful over the next multiple decades,” Dollaku told TechCrunch. “Doubling down in its investment was really a function of two things: the team’s continued high-quality execution right and statistics that are really hard on ‘why.’ They are the hard, important metrics that every merchant cares about because they have a direct impact on the helpless. EcoCart solves and improves those numbers for their merchants, which is really important.”
The global carbon footprint management industry was valued at $9.3 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $18.2 billion by 2031. EcoCart is joining an increasingly crowded space working to keep temperatures below the 1.5°C mark, which experts say will require the world to cut 30 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2030.
We’ve seen similar offerings from companies such as Flora, which measures consumer carbon footprints and then suggests products to help offset that, or Klima, which also helps people understand and offset carbon emissions. Meanwhile, Lune, Planet FWD and Vaayu are also developing solutions for this space.
Where EcoCart says it differentiates itself is in its “carefully vetted offsetting projects” and partners it works with to help customers fund impactful projects. Since its seed round, the company has also expanded its capabilities, which include product detail page content, educational home page banners, live impact counters and in-depth sustainability reporting.
Brands using the company’s tools have seen a more than 60% adoption rate from their customers, which it says has resulted in up to 22% lift in conversion rate and a 38% increase in average order value.
Meanwhile, Twomey says the company will invest its Series A dollars into additional hires to support its product and sales and marketing teams. EcoCart will continue to build out a product suite of tools for merchants and retailers and its projects portfolio to identify additional opportunities for its community.