Why We Invested: Greenspark

We spend a lot of time thinking about our planet. While things like ESG and COP 26 might get a lot of attention and headlines, is it changing our behaviour or impacting the way we make buying decisions? E-commerce enables us as consumers to buy more and buy more efficiently, but what about creating these products, the energy consumption and the impact on our planet to produce these products that make our everyday lives more enjoyable?

These challenges are part of the reason we’re excited about our investment in Greenspark. Along with BBVA, which has recently been named Europe’s most sustainable bank, our partnership has spent a great deal of time over the last 3 years exploring teams and opportunities to make an impact in the sustainability space. We’ve looked at a lot of infrastructure and financial services tools and products that would have a climate-positive impact. Sometimes simple solutions are the best and that’s what we believe we found in Greenspark.

Greenspark is building a platform that will enable businesses to take environmental action in an efficient, effective and innovative way. By building infrastructure to enable e-commerce retailers and other organisations to embed sustainability contributions, Greenspark has the potential to be the Stripe for sustainability. Enabling businesses and consumers to think about, as well as act on their environmental and sustainability impact is no longer a niche concern for customers, and the movement needs a platform like Greenspark in order to meet our goals as a society.

The founders, Lenny and Matt, had been building an e-commerce marketplace for ethical fashion for a number of years when they realised that the infrastructure to enable impact-driven consumers to contribute to the sustainability of supply chains behind their purchases was non-existent. By building Greenspark, the founders have built a solid foundation for creating lasting and sustainable change in the way consumers interact with businesses.

This is only the beginning, by building infrastructure in this space and working with brands, businesses and consumers, the Greenspark team will be able to become leaders in this global movement. They’ve already seen customer appetite and impact with regards to brands engaging and embedding their software in the purchase flow and are already planting over 5,000 trees per month as a result of their early product release.

From the sole trader selling handmade soaps to large global players, sustainability will be more and more of a necessity in how they communicate with their customers and how consumers want to buy from businesses. With Greenspark, they can make the transition from a relationship of buying and selling to buying and selling sustainably a reality.