EcoCart directs $14.5 million in new funding into its sustainable shopping experience

With all the plastic and paper covering the things we buy, more and more consumers are looking for companies that do business in a more sustainable way.

EcoCart has built the infrastructure for e-commerce companies and works with them to make this shopping experience more transparent and sustainable. Here’s how it works: The three-year-old software company performs product lifecycle audits for its clients to help them calculate, analyze and offset their carbon emissions.

Customers can see how this company is making strides in protecting trees and using clean energy sources, while companies can offer offsetting initiatives in their shopping experience – for example, providing a way to make a purchase carbon neutral or showing the number of trees saved from the ordinance.

“Consumers are looking for ways to shop sustainably, but brands don’t have a great way to communicate that to their customers or do it in a low-cost, easy-to-understand way, and we’re helping them do just that,” he said. EcoCart co-founder Dane Baker told TechCrunch.

Baker and Peter Twomey founded the company about three and a half years ago and launched their 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 clients.

EcoCart is back, having raised $14.15 million in Series A dollars and has over 2,000 brands as customers including Siete Foods, Cotopaxi, Supergoop! and bird scooters. He also increased revenue by more than 8x and increased the number of employees from 5 to more than 30 employees.

“We developed the Series A to meet the demands of our customers, especially as we enter the 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 Product Director 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, a partner at Base10 Partners, said doubling his investment in EcoCart was a result of seeing the sales process change, digitize and lean towards the climate.

“EcoCart fits perfectly into these megatrends that we think will be really impactful in the coming decades,” Dollaku told TechCrunch. “Doubling your investment is really the result of two things: consistent high-quality, accurate team performance and statistics that really have a hard ‘why’. These are hard and important metrics that every trader cares about because they have a direct impact on losses. EcoCart solves and improves those numbers for its merchants, which is very important.”

The global carbon footprint management industry was valued at USD 9.3 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 18.2 billion by 2031. 30 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions per year by 2030.

We’ve seen similar offerings from companies like Flora, which measures consumers’ carbon footprint and suggests products to offset it, or Klima, which also helps people understand and offset carbon emissions. Meanwhile, Lune, Planet FWD and Vaayu are also developing solutions for this space.

What EcoCart says sets it apart is its “vetted offset projects” and the partners it works with to help clients finance impressive projects. Since the seed round, the company has also expanded its capabilities, which include product detail page content, educational homepage banners, live impact counters and detailed sustainability reports.

Brands using the company’s tools have achieved an adoption rate of over 60% from their customers, resulting in up to a 22% increase in conversion rate and a 38% increase in average order value.

Meanwhile, Twomey says the company will invest its Series A dollars in additional hiring to support its manufacturing and sales and marketing teams. EcoCart will continue to build product tools for retailers and merchants and its portfolio of projects to identify additional opportunities for its community.