Startup stage: Eco.mio helps companies choose green travel options for their employees

Ecomio

Founded in 2021, Eco.mio helps businesses meet climate change goals and reduce travel costs using add-ons to existing booking tools.

The company has strategic partnerships with Amadeus and 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 meet climate change goals and reduce travel costs without implementing strict travel policies. Through add-ons that easily integrate into existing booking tools, employees choose greener travel options and participate in changing their behavior. Emissions from business travel will be reduced by approximately 20%.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Eco.mio is a browser extension that encourages travelers to choose eco-friendly alternatives through nudge and gamification features such as points, rankings, and rewards. This tool displays incentives for domestic and international employees and allows employees to directly compare their travel behavior with their colleagues and teams. Understand your company’s performance with company rankings and scores that indicate top green travelers. Companies can tailor nudges and rewards to suit their needs. This means you can donate the savings generated to environmental projects or directly reward conscious travelers. Thereby, Eco.mio allows companies to meet their climate goals and reduce travel costs at the same time.

The applied solution analyzes traveler and route data with machine learning algorithms to transparently display sustainability factors for each booking option. Eco.mio is therefore able to customize nudges for clients and their users to maximize their impact.

Please give us your company’s SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.

Strengths

• Eco.mio has strategic partnerships with booking tools provider Amadeus and BCD consulting arm Advito. Many features have been created in collaboration with leading companies in the industry, ensuring deep insight into your needs and requirements.
• The founding team consists of three people with inside knowledge of the leading travel industry and software development. They are surrounded by an international, diverse and ambitious team with strong intrinsic motivation.
• A reliable and scalable technology stack is used.
• Covering global routes increases the number of use cases.

Weakness

• Due to the temporarily small size of the team, strict prioritization is required.
• Additionally, the industry is not made up solely of early adopters, and the process may take some time.

opportunity

• The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requires companies to report and reduce business travel emissions, while at the same time feeling the need to remain attractive to employees.
• This tool is highly configurable to suit customer needs.
• Expansion to other markets with high business travel is also possible, such as the UK and US.
• Expanding our offering to new use cases, such as eco-friendly hotels and businesses that don’t have a booking tool.

threat

• The legal environment may change and require a different focus in the long term (e.g. government ban on short-haul flights).

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

Eco.mio increases transparency about the emissions of different modes of transport and playfully translates them into incentives such as:

• Help customers change employee behavior without introducing stricter travel policies.
• Supporting the transition to a more conscious world of business travel by reducing CO2 by an average of 20%₂ Emissions during business trips.

You have a product, but how can you get more customers?

We have hired six large consulting firms in recent months. Through our sales strategy, we directly reach interested customers and partners, and our continuous efforts increase our brand awareness.

Eco.mio is a major contributor to the business travel industry, including hosting panel discussions at the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). Inbound leads were generated through events and being active on his LinkedIn.

Additionally, Eco.mio targets high-potential customers through highly personalized email campaigns. After the demo, the lead becomes hooked and interested in bringing other stakeholders into the conversation to move toward launch.

Please tell us about the process you went through to establish your company’s true needs and addressable market size.

Business travel accounts for approximately 50% of global travel and associated emissions. The CSRD requires companies to focus on sustainability in travel and significantly reduce CO emissions.₂ emissions. At the same time, they don’t want to introduce stricter travel policies because attracting talent is already difficult. All this leads to a favorable market environment for Eco.mio.

• Discovery: Eco.mio conducted over 50 discovery interviews with customers and users. Furthermore, his study of more than 130 travelers to understand behavior and motivations found that 80% of travelers would be willing to take up to a six-hour train ride if compensated. Promising observations were made.
• MVP: Co-creation with a leading consulting firm to understand and address market needs.
• Beta version: A pilot with four customers proved promising conditions and a rewarding methodology. What you learn can also be applied to your current customers.
• Attractiveness for employers: Customers have many options to customize products to their needs and employees to retain and attract talent.
• Validity: For calculation of CO₂ Emissions and savings use Advito’s new GATE4 standard. This is more accurate than traditional calculation methods because it also takes into account the type of plane and airline.

Considering the heavy travel industry with supported booking tools, Eco.mio caters to a serviceable market of €.15 billion to 20 billion.

When and how do you make money?

We have an annual license model and already have our first regular customers. There are upsell opportunities to existing loyal customers and we are steadily working on our ability to expand our product offering for future growth.

What is the background and track record of the founding team?

Sarah Benally: After working as a frequently traveling management consultant, Sarah joined climate protection non-governmental organization Atmosphere. She worked closely with clients on offsetting strategies and gained in-depth knowledge of the industry which led Sarah to co-found Eco.mio to help companies actually reduce their business travel emissions.

Mario Blatter: Having studied electrical engineering and information technology at ETH Zurich, Mario has always had a passion for the intersection of business and technology. As president of the student consultancy company ETH Juniors, he contributed to bridging academia and practice. His experience working at engineering companies like ABB not only provided industry insight but also strengthened his ability to bridge the gap between technology and business.

Katharina Riederer: Kati’s inspiration came from her own experience as a frequently traveling strategic consultant at Roland Berger. Now, she is especially proud that her former employer is one of her Eco.mio corporate customers. Kati has a background in micro and nanotechnology from ETH Zurich and the University of Michigan, giving her a wealth of technical knowledge. She was featured in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30.”

How have you approached diversity and inclusion within your business?

Our team is made up of people from 7 different countries living in 6 different cities around the world. Diversity and inclusion are considered in all decisions related to people. I admit that it’s especially difficult to recruit women in the software development field. Do you have any recommendations?

What has been the most challenging part of founding your business so far?

Eco.mio started its journey through co-creation with large companies. For this I received my first payment. It was inconceivable that this first customer, whose annual contract value could exceed his million, would deprioritize the initiative due to a change in internal strategy. We had to start almost from scratch and push to quickly find new customers to validate. It was shocking at first, but ultimately it allowed us to focus on building products that the market needed, not just one large customer.

Travel startups typically face a pretty tough time making an impact, so why can you be one of the lucky ones?

80% of business travelers say they would change their behavior if they knew the impact, were guided to make the right choices, and had attractive incentives.

This is where Eco.mio comes into play, applying gamification and social behavioral science to influence the most promising decisions.

Where do you think your startup will be a year from now?

The team will focus on onboarding additional large companies with significant CO2 emissions.₂
Footprint is caused by business travel. We aim to work even more closely with travel management companies and online booking tools. Eco.mio is constantly working to improve its tools and offers many customization opportunities to increase your influence within your company and industry. Another promising use case is the unmanaged travel market where people book trips without using a booking tool.

What is your end goal (go public, be acquired, grow, remain private, etc.)?

We want to maximize the impact of reducing carbon emissions during business travel while building a sustainable company. Above all, the health of our highly dedicated team is important to us. We want to walk together towards a better future.