Treasury official turned fintech entrepreneur Ben Gleisner. Photo / File
Treasury official turned fintech entrepreneur Ben Gleisner. Photo / File
The founder of carbon footprint tracking platform CoGo says his company is on track for an over-subscribed Series A round as it seeks to raise US$20 million ($27.4m).
Ben Gleisner says CoGo has so far had expressions of interest totalling US$24.6m ($35m).
He says interest in the raise has beenboosted, in part, by the looming COP26 summit.
But he adds that broader support for carbon-tracking fintech apps has already been demonstrated by a clutch of recent raises, including Sweden's Doconomy, which raised US$17m in a Series A round, and US startup Patch, which brought in US$4.5m in seed money from investors in a round led by Silicon Valley A-list VC outfit Andreessen Horowitz.
CoGo (short for "Connecting Good") developed its technology after Gleisner left his job as a Treasury economist and raised $8m in seed funding from investors including Sir Stephen Tindall's K1W1, Icehouse Ventures and the Crown-backed NZGCP.
Gleisner says existing investors are shaping up to chip in another $5m.
He says he has also had expressions of interest from five offshore impact and green funds, each at the $5m level, with a further $5m set to come in from richlist families. At least one Aussie private equity fund is lined up at the $5m-plus level, too.
CoGo began with a focus on its own app for tracking the "greenness" of spending.
But as it was developed, it morphed into a white-label product that banks can incorporate into their own apps.
The founder says the lack of open banking regulations in New Zealand made a full-blooded CoGo platform unviable for New Zealand, "so I was forced to relocate to the UK for a couple of years".
There, Gleisner landed his first major customer, NatWest, after winning a competitive tender to add carbon-tracking capability to the UK bank's app.
After a pilot, Natwest will give all 8 million users of its app access to CoGo's features in around a fortnight. Its customers will be able to use new features (supplied behind the scenes by CoGo) to track the carbon impact of their individual purchases - and keep a running total of their carbon footprint, complete with the option to buy offsets.
Last month, CoGo signed its second major client, ASB parent CommBank across the Tasman. Satandar Group in Spain has also recently come onboard.
Cogo is working to make carbon tracking features available within cloud accounting apps for small business customers in around six to 12 months.
The founder says his company has also just won a tender to supply carbon footprint tracking for a Dutch bank's app.
In all cases, Gleisner says CoGo will be paid according to how many of each bank's customers end up using its trackers - with minimum and maximum caps (from the end-users point of view, the trackers will just be another free component of their bank's app).
Gleisner with CoGo's London-based head of marketing and growth, Ele Ward. Photo / Supplied
Assuming CoGo's Series A raise does get over the line - and then some - Gleisner says the funds will be used to boost staff numbers from 65 today across the UK and NZ to around 150, for product development and a push into North America and Asia.
He also sees his company expanding beyond banking into areas like insurance and supermarket shopping - where, among other things, he sees a need for a plastic packaging tracker.
And our lack of open banking notwithstanding - Gleisner says he is talking to the major banks here about a full-blooded implementation of CoGo. Westpac customers can already access its original app, which CoGo developed before shifting to its white-label and app support focus.
He sees not just green-spending trackers, but also CoGo tools that will help guide consumers' shop according to their personal ethics. They could, for example, search for a business with a gender pay gap of 20 per cent or narrower, or one owned by local iwi.
Glisner says the Series A round will wrap up in early December.
