Sir Richard Branson
By Staff Writer, écoute moi
Sir Richard Branson has named Edinburgh based fintech Sustainably as his start-up of the year 2019. It is delighted to see that the business has had positive social impact on the customers which encourages them their cashless transactions and donating “spare change” automatically every time they shop, distributing micro-donations to their chosen good causes.
Branson’s laurels continues the relationship between his Virgin empire and Sustainably, after his entrepreneurial support organisation Virgin Startup provided funding to the fledgling fintech in 2017. He said, “We were particularly proud when Virgin StartUp-supported ventures swept the board at the star-studded final of the WeWork Creator Awards in London.”
Sir Richard Branson
The announcement caps a significant year for Sustainably, with highlights including winning WeWork’s Creator Awards and being selected as one of 15 finalists to participate in Nesta Challenges’ Open Up 2020 Challenge. Branson said: “It’s encouraging to see businesses we’ve supported through Virgin StartUp achieving real growth and scale, whilst having a strong purpose at their core. “Many of the best ideas are ones that solve a problem and make things easier for people.”
The other big winners on the night were Sustainably, a Scottish mother and daughter team, who took home £130k for their company, which uses tech to enable frictionless charitable giving. They were also runners up in the Virgin StartUp 10. Scotland awards earlier in the year and I had the chance to surprise them at a hotel in Edinburgh during their winners mentoring session and learn all about what they’re getting up to. Quinn, who founded the company with her daughter Eishel, said “We’ve had incredible support from Richard and the team at Virgin, having received funding from Virgin Startup that enabled us to create our successful beta product in 2017. We’d also like to thank our team. We would not be here without them and receiving this recognition is testament to their amazing work. With the business going from strength to strength, we were really happy to have Sustainably join CrowdBoost – our equity crowdfunding accelerator – and we’re thrilled that they’re well on their way to scaling their impact led business, with the recent cash injection from WeWork.”
Sir Richard Branson
Their team has increased in number from four people to eight and they have two offices in Edinburgh and London and has plans to double in size again in 2020. Sustainably started off with a successful beta app for Monzo bank customers, and has now connected to 13 UK banks. This will mean Sustainably is available to 95% of the UK population.
The company also plans to connect to all high street banks and challenger banks, and launch RealTimeCSR so retailers and employers can match donate with their customers and employers in real time, in the year ahead.