San Diego’s EcoATM Raises $17M As It Builds Recycling Cash Machine
much Koh invested. Koh is a former director of manufacturing and business development for Hewlett-Packard in Asia, and later became chairman of the Singapore Telecom Group and chairman of Singapore Airlines.
PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, and AKS Capital also joined in the new round with existing investors Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, and Tao Venture Capital Partners.
EcoATM says it also was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research grant for as much as $1 million from the National Science Foundation. The company received a $180,000 grant last year to fund development of advanced technologies used in the network of EcoATM kiosks.
“We had multiple people chasing the deal,” says Randy Hawks, managing director of Oakland, CA-based Claremont Creek Ventures, who joined the board when EcoATM raised its previous $14.4 million round in early 2011. “We had more people wanting to participate than we had room for them.”
EcoATM CEO Tom Tullie
The new funding will be used to broaden the company’s business infrastructure in anticipation of a broader product roll-out, first regionally and then nationwide, Tullie says. The company has about 35 employees, and has used D&K Engineering, a private engineering services and contract manufacturing company in San Diego, to manufacture about 50 kiosks so far.
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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