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Reforestation and climate action platform Ecologi has secured £4m ($5.7m) of investment to help scale its climate action and plant a million trees a day.
Ecologi is a subscription service that allows individuals, families and businesses to use their pocket change to fund climate solutions.
This investment, led by General Catalyst, will help Ecologi progress its climate impact exponentially as it heads towards its target to reduce 50% of global emissions by 2040.
With a critical decade for climate action ahead, and with the climate crisis worsening, the team at Ecologi realised it didn’t have the luxury of time to grow traditionally through donations and slower organic growth.
In order to make a serious impact on the planet, the team needed investment to scale.
Ecologi is renowned for transparency and puts all receipts, certificates, board meeting minutes and financial statements up on its public ledger.
As well as allowing the team to scale its reforestation and carbon reducing projects globally, the investment will also allow this transparency to be taken to the next level.
The funding will enable the launch of an innovative service that allows businesses to measure their carbon footprint automatically via Open Banking.
This offering will revolutionise the traditional way of calculating carbon footprints, which have previously been expensive to determine, and make the service available to businesses at a fraction of the price.
This will also double down on its open API work which powers thousands of e-commerce shops around the world
‘It’s not just a sum of money that we were looking for, but a partner who wholly understands the delicate conditions which Ecologi needs to thrive: putting the planet first; complete transparency; keeping operational costs minimal and staying ethical.
‘Amongst 50 or so investors we spoke to, it was General Catalyst who fully understood this ethical tightrope with our long-term plans to raise the bar on what it means to be a social enterprise. They understood that the future of Ecologi should be part-owned by our community via crowdfunding – an exciting development to own a stake in Ecologi and our planet too.’
ELLIOT COAD
Ecologi co-founder
The platform was founded in 2019 by husband and wife team Elliot and Lucy, and their friend Alex. They were in search of a way to contribute to the climate crisis in a bigger way.
Since then, the business has continued to grow steadily and its community is now funding one million trees every 10 days.
Each of the platform’s 14,614 members and 6,305 business subscribers grows their own forest with at least 12 trees a month, setting climate goals on their profiles while minimising their carbon footprint by funding a wide range of carbon-reduction projects.
Ecologi has already reduced 427,228 verified tonnes of CO2 emissions through its climate projects, and the overall impact of the Ecologi community is estimated at 5 million tonnes of CO2 reductions, including the projected lifetime emissions absorption from the 15 million trees it has planted.
To put the community’s 5m CO2 reduction figure into perspective, the CO2 emissions of cities like Bristol’s annual CO2 emissions are 1.7m, and Birmingham emits 4.5m CO2 each year.
General Catalyst has a knack of turning their investments into household names with success stories including AirBnB, Deliveroo, Snapchat, Stripe and Monzo to name just a few.
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