Replenysh: Atoms, Bits, and Sustainability
The term “mission-driven” is often used to describe founders and teams in the startup world, and we too participate in that usage — fervently and frequently. In fact, it’s probably the single most important factor in our commitment to support a company as an investor.
In the case of Replenysh, Mark Armen is the epitome of “mission-driven” in the world of sustainable systems and climate change. When we first met him, we discovered he had spent his adult life focused on solving the problem of reusing atoms in an immensely important area of circular economy: materials waste generation and recycling.
According to the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only 36% of our generated product/packaging materials is recycled into reusable materials. The remainder is either destroyed through combustion (toxin- and carbon-producing), moved to landfill, or ends up in our oceans and sometimes even our mountains.
Mark worked by day as a data and operations lead at Greenopolis, a division of Waste Management, Inc, and nights and weekends as the inventor of Gulpable, a fun creative receptacle for collecting and recycling cigarette butts, which was distributed to cities around the country. Later, as a VP of Supply Chain for beverage CPG bottling manufacturer, he began to see an opportunity to create a closed-loop system using the best practices of software-as-a-service technology and marketplace/logistics structure.
Mark and his team came up with the idea of using bits to move these atoms into a net-positive and profitable loop: create a digital source of truth about price and availability information from the fragmented network of recycling hubs and mills dotted around the country, and then move these materials on behalf of the manufacturers.
If they could build the necessary software and transactional tools to create a true B2B digital marketplace, then would the Coca-Colas and Pepsicos of the $1T+ global consumer goods industry be interested in creating a circular economy which is both more profitable for their bottom line, and net-positive for the world?
So far, the early answers to these questions are promising. In the course of 18 months, Replenysh has shipped to both supply- and demand-side customers a digital SaaS marketplace with transactional payment features and seamless logistics capabilities. Today, the Replenysh marketplace accounts for 15% of the bottle-grade PET recycling market and is creating more efficiency and profit for the companies participating. We’ve been prior investors in materials science technology companies, such as Zymergen and Connora Systems, who are innovating the quality of molecules we use in our products. Replenysh serves to solve the sustainability problem immediately from the other end of the supply chain: recycle and reuse.
At Kindred Ventures today, we are stoked to share that we led their $2M seed round last year alongside our friends at Floodgate and 122West, and a supportive syndicate of angels including Curtis Chambers (first CTO at Uber), Jeff Miller (Uber ATG), Tom McInerney, and Brian Thomas (co-founder at Clutter).
Steve & Kanyi
To read more about the Replenysh product and sustainable vision for the future, please read Mark’s blog post today announcing the company’s mission:
https://medium.com/replenysh/announcing-replenysh-ac9d35e416ac
