San Diego Business Profile: ecoAtm
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 9:01AM 
One great thing about living in San Diego is watching the next great American companies sprout up on our streets. Award-winning San Diego start-up ecoATM has recently announced the closure of its first round of Series A preferred stock offering. Claremont Creek and Coinstar Inc. led the financing and Silicon Valley Bank is also contributing venture capital to the company. In total ecoATM has raised $14.4 million from this first round of stock offering.
As a young company ecoATM has caught the attention of a number of investors for its innovative automated self-serve kiosk that electronically and visually inspects almost any consumer electronic device and then buys back the item from the consumer. This is the first such kiosk device to be created and it uses a patented advanced machine vision technology as well as electronic diagnostics and a new form of artificial intelligence to evaluate the electronics placed in front of it. It does not stop there however. Once it has evaluated the electronic item, the kiosk will then connect the customer with a worldwide network that will compare prices for the item. If the customer wishes to sell the item it can then pay them either in store credit or cash.
The potential for the kiosks is huge, not just for consumers wanting to trade in electronics, but also on behalf of retailers and manufacturers for whom the kiosks have the ability to administer promotions and trade-ins or trade-ups. The Consumer Electronics Association has estimated that US consumers purchase around 500 million new electronic items every year and that their upgrade cycles are getting quicker as the pace of additional features speeds up. In addition, the average house in the US contains 26 separate electronic devices, many of which are no longer used. This adds up to an incredible 3 billion potential devices awaiting recycling. At the moment most consumers lack the means to recycle these devices and they end up in landfill sites creating more toxic waste. With eWaste now classed as the fastest growing part of the national waste stream, ecoATM have identified a massive market. They have also created an innovative and clean solution that offers the consumer a financial incentive and convenience to recycle, rather than throw away, old technology. Trials of the ecoATM have been incredibly successful, collecting tens of thousands of devices and paying the customers hundreds of thousands of dollars in return.
Claremont Creek and Coinstar both recognized the potential for these kiosks and their association with ecoATM. Randy Hawkes, the Managing Director of Claremont noted that "ecoATM provides tons of value to the consumer by giving them cash for their digital clunkers and simultaneously managing the recycling in a very earth-friendly way … They also have a smart business model. That's why we invested." Greg Kaplan, President and CEO of Coinstar liked the fusion of technology with the need to think about the environment: "ecoATM is an innovative automated retail concept that we believe will resonate with today's environmentally minded consumer …. we invested in ecoATM because we believe they have a viable and promising business and we are committed to fostering innovation in automated retail."
ecoATM represent the latest addition to San Diego’s burgeoning Clean Tech industry. Clean Tech San Diego was formed to help San Diego lead the way in cleaner and newer technologies and the city is currently home to more than 600 clean tech businesses, including Aptera Motors, Kyocera Solar, Sapphire Energy and Synthetic Genomics.
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