In Ireland an estimated 1 million tonnes of food goes to waste each year. The food service sector is responsible for approximately 250,000 tonnes of this food waste, costing €300 million to the industry per annum and resulting in 875,000 tonnes of CO2. Founded in 2020, Positive Carbon's product tracks and logs all of a business’s food waste using AI and LIDAR, the same technology used in self-driving cars, to give staff a full understanding of what, and how much, they are throwing away. This enables them to make informed decisions around their purchasing, production and preparation to reduce their food waste.
On the investment, CEO of Positive Carbon, Mark Kirwan, said: "We are delighted to have the opportunity to work and grow with the support of APX. This investment will help us to scale our solution in Ireland and bring the most advanced food waste monitoring technology to the European market. This partnership will help us to get into the position to bring Irish investors on board later in the year and to help ensure Ireland is a world leader in reducing food waste.”
Jörg Rheinboldt, Managing Director at APX, said: “We are very happy to have invested in Positive Carbon and added the first Irish company to our portfolio. The team has a great energy, and we believe their tech can really help solve food waste in the B2B consumption sector. We look forward to working with them as their long-term partner in developing their business throughout Europe.”
Positive Carbon is backed by Enterprise Ireland and was recently announced as a 2021 Awardee of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland’s prestigious Impact Programme. Through the use of their patented food waste sensors & food detection AI, Positive Carbon provides high quality food waste management tools to hotels, restaurants & cities to enable them to develop advanced waste reduction strategies which increase their gross profits by 2-8%. Early Customers who have worked with Positive Carbon have reduced their food waste by value by 42% with minimal interruption.To find out more about Positive Carbon, see positivecarbon.org.
APX is a very-early-stage VC. Based in Berlin and backed by Axel Springer and Porsche, APX supports and partners with the most ambitious pre-seed startups from Europe and beyond - often as their first investor. Since 2018, APX has invested in 100+ startups across 20+ industries with founders from 20+ countries together with 100+ co-investors. Find out more on APX.vc.
