inoqo, an Austrian SaaS startup committed to enabling grocery retailers to assess, communicate and reduce the environmental impact of their food supply chains, has successfully closed a 7-figure round, after successfully pivoting to a B2B business model.
The capital came from prominent family offices and angel investors such as Christian Kaar, co-founder and former CTO of Runtastic (which exited to Adidas for €220 million); Heinz Hahn, former President FMCG of Mondelez; Felix and Susanne Porsche; Daniel Zech (Former SevenVentures and TV Show 2 Minutes 2 Million) on behalf of FJH Immobilien- und Vermögensverwaltung GmbH, as well as Triple Impact Ventures.
Heinz Hahn said: “It was clear to me that inoqo’s vision was precisely addressing a critical need within the food industry and has the potential to become the leading AI-driven environmental product management platform.”
Founded in 2020, inoqo has also partnered with ODA, Norways’ leading e-grocery retailer. Significantly, inoqo enabled Oda to calculate the climate impact of 6,600 F&B products, taking the product ingredients, composition and all production and distribution processes into account. inoqo’s technology is heralding a new era in Scope 3 assessment and communication within the grocery industry by enabling grocery retailers to assess the impact of their thousands of F&B products at an unprecedented level of scale and accuracy.
The collaboration between these two companies comes as no surprise. ODA has earned international attention for its ambitious sustainability goals, particularly last year when it started communicating the carbon footprint of their customer’s grocery shopping on their receipts. At the same time, inoqo released a powerful AI-driven platform designed for the scalable, cost-effective, and timely assessment of thousands of F&B products.
“The AI-powered platform is able to re-engineer the composition of thousands of F&B products based on the data the retailers have available today. It can consequently assess the impact of products while taking specific features of the product such as the likely country of origin of its ingredients, production processes, packaging, or transportation into account,” commented inoqo’s Founder & CEO Markus Linder.
To avoid greenwashing inoqo uses conservative data in the absence of primary data for consumer communication, and enables producers to provide more and more specific product data over time, which allows the technology to replace conservative assumptions by actual product data.
“More than 90% of the carbon emissions of grocery retailers originate from the thousands of F&B products they sell. Consumers, investors, their employees and regulators are requesting them to swiftly join the race to net-zero emissions. With our inoqo platform we provide them with a fly-wheel that enables them to communicate the impact of their products to consumers, while getting an ever more granular view of the impact of their thousands of products over time,” added Linder.
Turi Pettersen, Head of Sustainability and DEI at Oda, commented: “We are genuinely impressed with what inoqo has to offer! We believe that retailers can truly make a significant impact in this space by leading the industry – not only by setting an example for other retailers but also by challenging their producers to acknowledge and improve their carbon footprint. It all begins with a robust understanding of the current state through comparable data!”
inoqo initially launched in 2020 with a consumer-focused app designed to help end consumers understand the environmental impact of their daily grocery purchases. The app quickly gained popularity among environmentally conscious consumers in Austria. Recognized with several awards across Europe, inoqo’s offering also caught the attention of grocery retailers interested in harnessing its capabilities.
