STARTUP STAGE: Eco.mio helps companies guide employees to choose greener travel options

Eco.mio

Founded in 2021, Eco.mio helps companies achieve their climate goals and bring travel costs down using an add-on to existing booking tools.

The company has strategic partnerships with Amadeus and with BCD’s corporate travel consultancy, Advito.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Eco.mio is a B2B software-as-a-service business that helps companies achieve their climate goals and bring travel costs down without introducing stricter travel policies. Through an easily integrated add-on to the existing booking tool, employees get involved to choose greener travel options and change their behavior. Emissions of business travel are reduced by about 20%. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Eco.mio is a browser extension that motivates travelers through nudging and gamification features like points, rankings, as well as rewards, to opt for greener alternatives. The tool displays incentives for employees on national and international routes and enables them to directly compare their travel behavior to their colleagues or team. Company rankings and a score indicating top green travelers allow them to get an understanding of their performance. Companies can tailor the nudges and rewards to their needs: donate generated savings to environmental projects or directly reward conscious travelers. With this, Eco.mio enables companies to achieve their climate goals and reduce travel costs at the same time.

For the applied solution, traveler and route data are analyzed with machine learning algorithms and sustainability elements are transparently displayed for every booking option. Eco.mio is thus able to customize nudges to the client and its users, maximizing their impact.

Give us your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Eco.mio has strategic partnerships with booking tool provider Amadeus and BCD consulting arm Advito. Many features were co-created with a big industry player, ensuring deep insights into needs and requirements.
• The founders team consists of three people with insider knowledge from heavy travel industries and software development. They are surrounded by an international, diverse and ambitious team with strong intrinsic motivation.
• A reliable and scalable tech stack is used.
• Covering global routes increases number of use cases.

Weaknesses

• A strict prioritization necessary due to temporarily small team. 
• Also, the industry does not only consist of early adaptors, processes can take long.
  
  

Opportunities

• The European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) forces companies to report and reduce business travel emissions while at the same time they feel the need to stay attractive for their employees.
• The tool is highly configurable to customers' needs.
• Expansion possible to other business travel heavy markets like the United Kingdom and United States.
• Extension of offering to new use cases, e.g., green hotels and to companies without booking tools.
  
  

Threats

• Legislative environment could change and make it necessary to put focus differently in the long run (e.g. government forbidding short-haul flights).

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Eco.mio creates transparency about the emissions of different means of transport and playfully converts them into incentives which: 

• helps the customer change the behavior of their employees without introducing stricter travel policies, and 
• supports the shift towards a more conscious business travel world by avoiding on average 20% CO₂ emissions in business travel.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We have onboarded six big consulting companies during the last months. Through our sales strategy, we directly reach out to interesting customers and partners, and persistence pays into our brand awareness.

Eco.mio is a strong contributor to the business travel industry, e.g. hosting panel discussions at the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). Being active at events and on LinkedIn resulted in inbound leads. 

In addition, Eco.mio targets high-potential customers through highly personalized mailing campaigns. After a demo, leads are hooked and interested in including other stakeholders in the conversation to push towards a launch. 

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Business travel accounts for around 50% of global travel and the resulting emissions. The CSRD is mandating companies to focus on sustainability in travel and drastically reduce their CO₂ emissions. At the same time, they don’t want to introduce stricter travel policies because it is already challenging to attract talent. All this leads to favorable market conditions for Eco.mio.

• Discovery: Eco.mio made 50+ discovery interviews with customers and users. In addition, a study with 130-plus travelers to understand behavior and motivation led to the promising observation that for a reward, 80% of travelers are willing to take a train up to six hours.
• MVP: Co-creation with a large consulting company in order to understand and tackle the market need.
• Beta Version: Pilots with four customers proved promising conditions and rewarding methods. Learnings can be applied to current customers.
• Attractiveness of employers: Customers are given many options to customize the product to their needs and their employees in order to keep and attract talent.
• Validity: For the calculation of CO₂ emissions and savings, the new GATE4 standard of Advito is used, which is more accurate than conventional calculation methods, as they also consider plane type and airline.

Taking into consideration heavy travel industries that use supported booking tools, Eco.mio addresses a service available market of €15-20 billion.

How and when will you make money?

We work with a yearly license model and already have our first recurring customers. There are upselling opportunities with existing recurring customers, and we steadily work on our ability to extend our product offering for future growth.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Sarah Benarey: After working as a frequently traveling management consultant, Sarah joined the climate protection non-governmental organization Atmosfair. Working closely with clients on offsetting strategies, gaining deep knowledge in the industry, Sarah decided to co-found Eco.mio to support companies in the actual reduction of business travel emissions.

Mario Blatter: With a background in electrical engineering and information technology from ETH Zurich, Mario has always had a passion for merging business and technology. As the president of Student Consultancy ETH Juniors, he helped bridge academia and practical application. His experience working in engineering companies like ABB not only provided him with industry insights but also reinforced his ability to bridge the gap between technology and business.

Katharina Riederer: Kati’s inspiration originated from her own experience as a frequently traveling strategy consultant at Roland Berger. Today she is particularly proud to count her former employer as one of Eco.mio’s enterprise customers. Kati has an academic background in micro and nanotechnology from ETH Zurich and the University of Michigan, giving her strong tech knowledge. She’s been featured in Forbes 30 under 30.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Our team consists of people from seven different nations, located in six different cities in the world. Diversity and inclusion are considered in every people-related decision that is taken. We admit that is particularly hard for us to fill positions with female talents in software development. Any recommendations? 

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Eco.mio started their journey with a co-creation with a large enterprise. For this, we received first payments. It was hard to see that this first customer with a potential annual contract value of over a million deprioritized the initiative due to a change in their internal strategy. We almost had to start from scratch and needed to push to quickly find new customers to validate. First, it was devastating, but in the end, it allowed us to focus on building a product that the market needs, not only one big customer.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

80% of business travelers state that they would change their behavior if they knew the impact, are guided to make the right choice and were rewarded with an attractive incentive. 

This is where Eco.mio comes into play and applies gamification and social behavioral science to impact the decision-making where it is most promising.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

The team will focus to onboard additional large companies for which a significant CO₂ footprint is provoked by business travel. We aim to work even more closely together with travel management companies and online booking tools. Eco.mio is constantly working on improving their tool and offering a lot of customization opportunities to increase their impact within companies and the industry. Another promising use case is the unmanaged travel market, where people book trips without booking tool. 

What is your end-game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

We want to have the greatest impact in reducing carbon emission in business travel while building a sustainable company. More than anything, the well-being of our highly dedicated team is important to us. We want to come far together for a better future.

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