Spanish startup GreeMko makes sustainability a win-win for corporations
How a green management technology helps companies easily calculate their environmental impact
What kind of planet do we want to live on? And, what kind of planet do we want to leave our children? It was existential questions like these that led Fernando Roman and fellow cofounders Jorge Portillo and Mar Robles to start GreeMko in 2018. The Madrid-based startup offers green management technology: software that helps corporations calculate their environmental impact, including their carbon footprint. GreeMko’s proprietary algorithm takes into account data from Internet of Things (IoT) platforms and scanned documents like invoices. GreeMko aims to succeed by creating a win-win situation for businesses. Fernando explains, “From a company’s perspective, sustainability is not only the right thing to do, but it also means competitiveness in the market, a way to attract talent, and access to niche markets, new investors, and new finance methods such as green loans.”
In 2019, GreeMko was accepted into Tetuan Valley, a Google for Startups Campus resident pre-seed accelerator. The program, held at Google for Startups’ Campus Madrid, helps early-stage startups build their first prototype and get their first clients in six weeks. “We have incredibly good memories from our time on Campus,” recounts Fernando. “We were able to share our challenges and milestones with many other startups, and the Google for Startups team was always willing to try and use our solutions.” For the GreeMko team, the best aspect of being a Campus resident by far was the community. “A few months after the accelerator ended with Tetuan Valley, we asked to be introduced to the team working on a project that Google was launching from Palo Alto,” shares Fernando. “Just a few short weeks later, we were having a conference call with them. I appreciate the team and community’s willingness to help and support us, and I hope that I can give back.”
In today’s remote working environment, GreeMko uses Google products daily to manage their workload, communication, and collaboration. Fernando shares, “Remote work is here to stay, and Google Workspace’s organizational and collaborative tools are a must for our team. Their ease of use, stability, and low cost allowed us to work remotely from the first day, without any loss performance.” GreeMko also uses Google products as key building blocks of their product offering. As Fernando explains, “Google Maps APIs allow us to help our customers calculate, manage, and consequently, reduce their carbon footprint from mobility. The Google Maps APIs are the only ones on the market that provide us with detailed information, such as the distance between two points for public transport, and what agency is providing these services. This allows us to scale our solution globally in an easy and fast manner.”
GreeMko also started using Angular — a platform for building mobile and web apps — in their newest release, and this is giving them improvements in TypeScript, code consistency, reusability, and ease of maintenance. Fernando shares, “Angular provides our developers with the scalability that they’re looking for. Every month, we ship new releases of our products, and Angular’s reusable and scalable components let us build a better product for our consumers.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic causing uncertainty throughout the business sector in 2020, GreeMko used the year to double down on their sales and prospecting efforts. They were able to secure global Google for Startups Campuses as a client and did a proof of concept initiative for Airbus. Among GreeMko’s long list of accomplishments for 2020, they can count all of their clients renewing their licenses for 2021, participating in the largest Climate Change Accelerator in Europe: the EIT Climate Change, being a finalist at the BBVA’s Climate Change Challenge, and winning the Caixa Bank Climate Change Challenge.
2021 is looking bright for GreeMko. Based on their success with corporations, they are now developing a solution for small- and medium-sized businesses. And in March 2021, they were named recipients of the Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project's Climate Leaders Awards in the startup category. Of that honor, Fernando says, “We’re a small team working extremely hard because we have a deep belief that our work will help society to develop in a more sustainable way. Receiving this award is a huge honor and recognition to our work and proof that we are on the right track.”