Imagine buying your morning coffee, knowing in real-time its contribution to climate change, then tapping a button to make up for it instantly. Yayzy is making this happen by giving you the means to track and offset the carbon footprint of your purchases in real-time.
The app automatically works out the environmental impact of your lifestyle and helps you shift to low carbon options. It uses secure open banking technology to connect to your bank account and calculates the carbon footprint of each purchase that you make in real-time. This makes the carbon footprint calculated more accurate and bespoke to the individual, helping you instantly connect your spending to its impact on the planet. The app also provides an aggregated view of your monthly carbon footprint and helps you understand it by translating it into familiar equivalences such as ‘number of miles driven in a car’.
The app supports access to 2500+ banks from across the globe, and you can connect up to 30 credit cards or bank accounts, so all your impact is in one place. Yayzy encourages individuals to reduce whatever emissions they can and counter the rest using certified carbon offsetting projects. This can be done ad-hoc, item by item or by signing up to a monthly subscription. Yayzy offers a unique climate portfolio that bundles multiple projects together for a more ‘holistic’ impact. These projects have been carefully selected based on a strict criteria and also advance the UN Sustainable development goals.
The app has won multiple awards, including #3 social impact product of the year on ProductHunt and features by Apple as “App of the day” and in the “Apps we love” section.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Myself, Pedro (our CFO) and Cris (our CTO), wanted to reduce our personal impact on the planet and do our bit to fight climate change. However, there were no solutions to guide us in our journey back then. Speaking to friends and family, we realised many people felt the same and decided to do something about it. Trackers provide agency and efficacy for change and we decided to build one for climate change. We linked it to individual spending to provide real-time feedback to our users and make tracking their personal impact easy and automatic.
After a year of testing, fundraising, sleepless nights, buckets of coffee and climate emergency at the forefront of their minds, we did it. Yayzy was born.
Since 2019 the Yayzy app has been going from strength to strength. The power is in the science, & the app is constantly developing to enable users to have a more personalised experience.
More from Interviews
- Meet Henry Wilkinson, Co-Founder at Drop-in, Ahead Of The Opening Of Drop-in Richmond
- Meet Oli Cook, CEO and Founder of ekko.
- Meet Marko Maras, CEO and Founder of Trustfull
- Meet Jeff Warren, Chief Technology Officer at Netwrix
- Evgeny Filichkin, Investment Advisor at Keytom & FinTech50 Judge, Tells Us What He’s Looking For From Entrants
- Tracy Prandi-Yuen, VP, Global Partnerships at Boku Inc. & FinTech50 Judge, Tells Us What She’s Looking For From Entrants
- Valentina Drofa, Co-Founder and CEO at Drofa Comms & FinTech50 Judge, Tells Us What She’s Looking For From Entrants
- Meet Oliver Bourne, Co-Founder Of WYSPR
How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
The team has been extremely successful in navigating the pandemic. Despite the challenges and an extremely uncertain funding environment, Yayzy raised £1.23m from Silicon Valley funds, a well-known celebrity and Seedrs (Crowdfunding round that was 367% subscribed).
The team increased from 5 at the start of the pandemic to 16 talented individuals; the app has iterated leaps and bounds and scaled to 30 countries, supporting more than 2500 banks. As a result, more and more individuals are turning to us to provide the guidance needed to create impact easily and quickly.
What can we hope to see from Yayzy in the future?
We see Yayzy inspiring and empowering individuals to lead effortless sustainable lives in the future. We are excited about releasing the facelifted version of the app in February 2022. It is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous version and would make it even easier for our customers to manage their personal impact.
We will continue to innovate and build useful products that solve our customers problems and make it easy for them to reduce their impact on the environment. We believe that it’s possible to automatically unlock positive environmental impact using all the financial products we use to manage our daily financial lives. We will continue to tread along this trajectory. Overall we are very excited about the future ahead.
