EcoCart announced that it had closed $3 million in seed funding led by Base10 Partners’ Chris Zeoli.
The round includes participation from Sugar Capital, Brian Sugar’s early-stage venture fund, and angel investors, including Jamie Sutton (creator of Shopify Plus), Ben Jabbaway (Founder and CEO of Privy), Rich Gardner (VP, Global Strategic Partnerships, Klaviyo), Kyle Hency (co-founder, Chubbies), Bryan Meehan (Chairman and former CEO, Blue Bottle Coffee), and Carly Strife (co-founder, BarkBox).
EcoCart was part of 500 Startups Batch 27 and plans to use the capital infusion to expand into new use cases.
EcoCart provides an e-commerce plugin for merchants to offer a carbon-neutral order option at checkout and a free-to-use Google Chrome extension that calculates users’ orders’ carbon footprint at over 10,000 stores and automatically offsets its impact by donating to independently verified carbon offsetting projects. With EcoCart, both brands and shoppers can take steps to protect the environment by limiting the effects of their carbon footprint while still selling or shopping as they would otherwise.
“We believe EcoCart is reinventing how brands interact with their customers while also managing and addressing their environmental impact at scale,” said Chris Zeoli, P\principal, Base10 Partners. “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.”
“EcoCart has been an incredible tool for boosting positive engagement among APL’s customer base by clearly demonstrating that we are taking steps to help our customers reduce their carbon footprints,” noted NJ Falk, managing partner, Athletic Propulsion Labs (APL).
The company spent its early months developing its propriety algorithm that calculates a unique online order’s carbon footprint. For its e-commerce plugin and browser extension, EcoCart’s algorithm uses each order’s unique characteristics, including the materials used to manufacture the item, shipping distance and package weight to estimate the emissions created from that order. “EcoCart’s algorithm is powered by research from institutions including Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, and created in partnership with climatology experts from top Universities,” said the brand.
Photo courtesy EcoCart
