EcoCart Raises $3M to Democratize Carbon Offsetting for the E-commerce Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EcoCart, a climate and sustainability-focused e-commerce enablement startup, announced today that it has closed $3M in Seed funding led by Base10 Partners' Chris Zeoli. The round includes participation from Sugar Capital, Brian Sugar's early-stage venture fund, as well as several strategic angel investors including Jamie Sutton (creator of Shopify Plus), Ben Jabbaway (Founder and CEO of Privy), Rich Gardner (VP of Global Strategic Partnerships, Klaviyo), Kyle Hency (co-founder of Chubbies), Bryan Meehan (Chairman and former CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee), and Carly Strife (co-founder of BarkBox). EcoCart was part of 500 Startups' Batch 27 and plans to use the injection of capital to expand into new uses cases.

Online shopping is a notoriously large contributor to climate change, especially as e-commerce growth has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Pre-COVID, every day in the U.S. alone, e-commerce packages traveled roughly the same distance as going to the moon and back 133,000 times. EcoCart's mission is to mitigate the harm online shopping does to the planet and has done so in an innovative, easy, and affordable way.

EcoCart offers two core carbon offsetting products: 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 the carbon footprint of users' orders at over 10,000 stores and automatically offsets that impact by donating to independently verified carbon offsetting projects. With EcoCart, both brands and shoppers are now able to take steps to protect the environment by mitigating the impact 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, Principal at 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."

Hundreds of e-commerce retailers trust EcoCart to offer carbon neutral products to their customers, including Atoms, The Little Market, Siete Foods, Christy Dawn, and Monday Swimwear. With EcoCart, brands of all sizes add a carbon neutral checkbox to their check out experience in minutes, which is free for brands to use and adds 1-2% on average to the customer's order total. Brands that partner with EcoCart can also opt to make all orders on their sites carbon neutral on behalf of their customers. When brands display these options at checkout and demonstrate a commitment to the environment, they see up to a 22% increase in cart conversion.

"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 at Athletic Propulsion Labs (APL), a luxury performance athletic footwear company and top Shopify store.

For merchants using the EcoCart e-commerce plugin, the company offers a robust portfolio of carbon offsetting projects to choose from. While other organizations opt for offsets that protect the planet in expected ways—think planting trees or protecting forests—EcoCart offers a wide breadth of projects that address climate change in unique and innovative ways. The company intentionally seeks out projects that also have a layer of social good, such as providing clean water or adding jobs for the nearby communities.

The company spent its early months developing its propriety algorithm that calculates the carbon footprint of every unique online order. For both the e-commerce plugin and browser extension, 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. The algorithm is powered by research from premier institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale, and was built in partnership with climatology experts from top universities.

"Climate change is real and it's here and I'm always excited to see companies taking matters into their own hands to make a positive impact towards a carbon neutral future," noted Dr. Zhi-Yong Yin, Professor of Environmental and Ocean Sciences at the University of San Diego. "The EcoCart founders' dedication to transparency and selecting projects that will actually help mitigate damage done to the climate is admirable. I'm looking forward to seeing what real change they can make toward the fight for climate change. We should never underestimate the impact of little things people do for saving the environment." 

About EcoCart

EcoCart is on a mission to make fighting climate change simple, cost-effective, and accessible for everyone. EcoCart offers an e-commerce plugin for merchants on Shopify, BigCommerce, and other major platforms, giving brands the ability to offer carbon neutral orders. EcoCart partners with carefully vetted, ethically proven, and scientifically verified carbon offsetting projects that comply with the world's major carbon standards to enable brands to seamlessly bring sustainable shopping to their customers. Get started at ecocart.io/business.

About Base10 Partners

Base10 is a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm investing in Automation for the Real Economy. Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, the firm focuses on Automation impacting many sectors of the Real Economy, including transportation, hardware manufacturing, logistics, and construction. Portfolio companies include The Pill Club, Chili Piper, Popmenu, and Pangaea. Connect via base10.vc.

SOURCE EcoCart