Tuesday 13 April 2021

EcoCart raises $3m to enable carbon neutral online shopping

EcoCart, a climate and sustainability-focused e-commerce enablement start-up, has raised $3 million (£2.18m) in seed funding to build carbon offsetting for the industry.

It offers two core carbon offsetting products: an e-commerce plug-in for businesses to offer a carbon neutral order option at checkout and a free-to-use extension that calculates the carbon footprint of users' orders at more than 10,000 stores and automatically offsets that impact by donating to independently verified carbon offsetting projects.

This enables both brands and shoppers to take steps to protect the environment by mitigating the impact of their carbon footprint while still selling or shopping as usual.

EcoCart's algorithm uses the unique characteristics of each order, including the materials used to manufacture the item, shipping distance and package weight to estimate the emissions created from that order.

Online shopping is a large contributor to climate change, especially as e-commerce growth has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to EcoCart, pre-COVID, every day in the US alone, e-commerce packages travelled roughly the same distance as going to the moon and back 133,000 times.

The funding round was led by Base10 Partners' Chris Zeoli and included participating from early-stage venture fund Sugar Capital as well as several strategic angel investors.

Chris Zeoli, Principal at Base10 Partners said: “We believe EcoCart is reinventing how brands interact with their customers while also managing and addressing their environmental impact at scale.

“EcoCart represents a solution that is helping reverse decades of harmful climate change. Base10 is proud to be partnering with the EcoCart founders as they continue to make carbon neutral shopping the new checkout standard for industries including retail, micromobility, food delivery and more.”