Soon you’ll be able to fund tree planting by simply using your debit card if you have TreeCard’s wooden Mastercard. The card channels profit from merchant surcharges into reforestation programs.
The provider (a UK yet-to-launch fintech) recently secured $5.1 million in a funding round led by EQT Ventures to get its eco-friendly card up and running. Several well-connected Angel investors, like Charlie Delingpole of ComplyAdvantage, Paul Foster of Indeed, and GoCardless founder Matt Robinson participated in the round and Seedcamp, Episode 1, and others.
TreeCard will use the funding to hire staff, support the roll-out of its spending card across the UK, and expand into other key European markets and the US.
Tom Mendoza, an EQT Ventures deal partner, said:
TreeCard has the potential to become a leading green finance brand, going where no brand has gone before in creating a de-facto platform for impactful financial management. At EQT Ventures, we’re increasingly aware of the environment and the impact that our investments have on the world around us, so we’re really excited to support the TreeCard team, who are actively working with the financial system to create a better future for the planet.
Thiel fellow Jamie Cox (who previously co-founded Cashew), James Dugan, and Gary Wu founded the company in August 2020 to create a fintech proposition with societal impact. Their goal is to become a leading green finance brand.
CEO Cox told Tech Crunch:
[At a] high level, the climate crisis is the biggest existential risk that humanity has faced in the last 200,000 years; we believe directing the flow of consumer finances is the most powerful way to affect change. We’re building a finance company that allows consumers not just to do less damage with their spending, but to actively improve the world.
We wanted to create a financial product with a difference, one that was far removed from greenwashing and allowed customers to improve the impact of their spending without drastically changing their habits. As a multi-stage fund, EQT Ventures’ presence across both Europe and the US provides the perfect springboard for us to launch into international markets.
After you link the TreeCard app to your bank account(s), you can begin routing your purchases through the card. From there, every transaction you make will funnel a portion of the card’s spending fees toward tree planting projects run by Ecosia, a green search engine that is also a pre-seed investor in TreeCard. (The search engine generates money for trees while you surf the internet.)
Ecosia was an early backer who bought a 20% stake in TreeCard for £1 million. The TreeCard founders consider Ecosia its “mother” company.
Cox said:
They’re our closest partner, and we’ll be working very closely with them as we grow. They invested the first cheque into the company and will be doing all our tree planting for us. Ecosia’s marketing team is extremely experienced, and they will be helping us use their search engine as a core channel for user acquisition over the next few years.
TreeCard makes money from the interchange and vows to invest 80% of profits into reforestation efforts led by Ecosia and other sustainable causes.
Cox said:
Interchange fees in the U.S. are significantly higher than in the EU, so this presents a sufficient revenue opportunity for us to perform our reforestation investments and cover marketing and management costs. In the EU, we will partner with an existing retail bank that will provide all our banking infrastructure for free. This will mean that, even though our interchange fee cut is lower, it will be sufficient to cover our costs in the EU. We will announce the name of the bank shortly.
The app linked to the wooden debit card lets users track spending, monitor how many trees they’ve helped plant, and even split bills with friends. It operates over the Mastercard network and uses back-end card processing services from Synapse.
Cox said:
We are building a free-spending card that allows consumers to spend more responsibly. The card uses interchange to reforest as they spend and sophisticated analytics to help them identify healthy spending as well as destructive ones.
The spending card works as a fully-fledged debit account, receiving top-ups from a user’s regular bank account. It supports chip and PIN, mobile payments, and contactless transactions.
TreeCard already has a waiting list of over 140,000 people long. The card is expected to launch in the next few months.
