Christian Arno, the founder of Lingo24 is backing a new ‘help-to-act service for the eco-minded’ startup.
Pawprint has been founded to help millions of consumers channel their efforts to fight climate change in the most impactful way and to help them build community worldwide around the effort.
Pawprint will use scientific data from expert Mike Berners-Lee’s company, Small World Consulting, and a range of personal- and team-oriented challenges, tips and deals, to help people on their way. It will initially take the form of a tracker app, akin to a ‘Strava for lower carbon living’, but will become a sizeable global community for people looking to share their understanding and reduce their communities’ carbon footprints.
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 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.
“Like most people, I’ve been thinking I was doing my bit for the environment for some time, but now I’ve looked into it and consulted experts, I realise I could have more impact by focusing on different things,” said founder, Christian Arno, “But that’s less than half the problem. It’s one thing understanding your footprint, and quite another to lower it on an ongoing basis, and to work with friends, work colleagues and others elsewhere in the world to pool resources and reduce our collective impact meaningfully. Hence the first challenge we’re setting ourselves – to help a million people to make a difference. We want to empower people with clear, scientifically valid and personalised information to make the right choices for them.”
“We are heavily focused on our mission of helping a million people to make a difference. In numerical terms, that means supporting one million people to reduce their annual carbon footprint by an average of one tonne each. Our immediate priority is to build trust with those people, and to positively and meaningfully impact the movement to lower carbon living. Through the process, we will consult extensively with our users about how we monetise this business without compromising that trust, and ideally in a way that allows people to have even more impact on global carbon emissions than they thought possible.”
The company is currently raising a seed investment round “in the low hundreds of thousands of pounds” and has had verbal commitment to invest from a variety of private investors.
It has signed a commercial agreement with Professor Mike Berners-Lee, author of “How Bad Are Banana” and “There’s No Planet B”, and an authority on the carbon footprint measurement.
Mike Berners-Lee said: “In the current climate emergency, it is easy for us as individuals to feel like we are not making a difference. However, building communities and working together can facilitate the sharing of knowledge and inspiration to help us push for the global change that we need to see. I fully support the development of apps that help us to focus our efforts on achieving lower-carbon lifestyles.”
Pawprint has also made its first senior appointment, in non-exec director, Tom Sermon. Mr Sermon was formerly CEO of Global Corporate Challenge and then CRO of Virgin Pulse, the global wellbeing movement, which transformed the lives and improved the health of 2.4 million employees every year. Mr Sermon is highly experienced in building a behavioural change platform.
Mr Sermon added: “The evidence of the climate emergency that we’ve created is crystal clear. To ensure we don’t end up as the generation on wrong side of history, we have to act, pool our collective efforts and each play our part in making simple changes to our daily routines & choices.”
