Marcus Richards
Pawprint helps businesses achieve net zero faster by making climate part of everybody’s job. Our platform aligns entire organisations behind its sustainability goals, and upskills workforces for a net zero future.
Tell us about yourself?
After graduating from Oxford, I founded Lingo24, a global tech-enabled language translation partner for mid-large companies. Lingo’s operations quickly scaled worldwide, reaching revenues over £12m and over 200 full-time employees, and a successful exit in December 2021.
Despite being proud of all things Lingo, I always had a gnawing to do something with meaning. There was no lightbulb moment as such, but when friends of mine opened a zero-waste shop in Edinburgh, I was impressed, but it also made me assess what I was doing to help the planet.
That, and the lecture from my dad (himself a force to be reckoned with in the climate activist community!) reminding me how little time we have to act for my own kids’ generation gave me the nudge I needed to start Pawprint.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
I wish I’d started Pawprint sooner! Helping people fight climate change is definitely where I should be spending my time.
What problem does your business solve?
Climate change is the biggest problem of our time. To avert serious environmental and social decline, we must act quickly and comprehensively. In the UK and across the world, businesses are facing increasing pressure to reduce emissions.
Businesses are made of people, most of whom are concerned about climate change, and willing to make changes to their work and lifestyle to reduce their carbon footprint. The problem is, many simply don’t know where to start when it comes to reducing their environmental impact in a meaningful way.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
When it comes to tackling a problem of such scale, providing people with the right knowledge and resources to play their part is crucial.
Books and online literature are inherently non-interactive and non-adaptive, and academic research is often inaccessible and indigestible.
Pawprint is specifically designed to inform and motivate climate action – big or small – through simple educational content, robust data, and gamified features grounded in behavioural science.
What is your magic sauce?
Where many existing apps or platforms focus on carbon offsetting, Pawprint is determined to capitalise on the huge potential for businesses and their people to reduce their environmental impact in the first place.
Nobody has built a community of more than a few thousand doing anything comparable to Pawprint, combining carbon footprint data, life and workstyle data, sentiment analysis, challenge adoption and rewards to power widespread, meaningful change.
Our business level reporting, the psychology behind employee engagement, and dedicated customer support are the foundations of customer partnerships that make a real difference, unmatched by competitors.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We’re on a mission to build the world’s most impactful platform to engage employees in climate action.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
We initially created Pawprint as a consumer product, but quickly realised that we could vastly widen our impact by working directly with businesses.
The business world, and us, still have a lot to learn when it comes to finding the best ways to engage and enable workforces to play their part in a low-carbon future, but we’re excited and ready to continue on that journey.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
If you are or know the decision makers in your company, get in touch and let’s chat about how we can reach net zero faster together: https://www.pawprint.eco/demo
