PAWPRINT, the eco start-up empowering people to fight climate change, has raised initial funding of £580k from a group of fifty angel investors. Investors come from a wide range of backgrounds, but most are professional investors, successful entrepreneurs and senior business executives. Investors who have professionally backed hugely successful companies like Tesla and Amazon are personally backing Pawprint alongside Scottish entrepreneurs such as Oli Norman, of itison and Kevin Dorren, of Dietchef.
“The response to the Pawprint concept has been very positive,” said founder Christian Arno, “and we now have an exceptionally high calibre and varied shareholder base. Our investors are buying into a long term vision to help millions of people to fight climate change. The quality and breadth of our investors is already proving really useful. Their insight is helping to build the foundations of what we hope will be a globally impactful company.”
The funding, which is more than Pawprint set out to raise, has allowed the company to accelerate hiring plans. Former Skyscanner Growth Director, Douglas Cook, is masterminding Pawprint’s marketing strategy, and former WoodMac VP, Mark McCafferty, is Head of Content. Both are building teams at WeWork Labs, the start-up accelerator program of the global shared office behemoth.
Pawprint will be a consumer behavioural change platform for eco-minded people. Consumers will answer questions about their lifestyle as part of their onboarding experience on the Pawprint app, and then be able to compare their personal ‘Pawprints’ in the four buckets of Home, Diet, Travel and Consumer Goods with country averages, and other groups of their choosing. They will then be presented with a personalised range of challenges and tips to help them choose if and how they make small changes to transition to a lower carbon lifestyle. As users reduce their own carbon footprints, they’ll be encouraged and incentivised with rewards to compete with and against their friends and colleagues to amplify their positive impact. Pawprint sources its data from Mike Berners-Lee, an authority on carbon footprint at Lancaster University, and author of “How Bad Are Bananas?”. The Pawprint app will be launching in the next couple of months and the Pawprint team will also be offering interested parties the opportunity to get involved and invest as little as ten pounds in the company at the same valuation as its angel investors through a soon to be launched campaign on Crowdcube. The plan is to have an engaged community of people on the ground to help give feedback and spread the word.
