San Diego’s EcoATM Raises $40M to Add 600+ Recycling Kiosks

EcoATM, electronics recycling, mobile devices

San Diego’s EcoATM, which operates automated kiosks that enable consumers to recycle their mobile devices, says it has raised $40 million in debt financing from Boston’s Falcon Investment Advisors to expand beyond its existing network of 300 kiosks in 20 states.

In the statement, EcoATM chairman and CEO Tom Tullie says, “There’s still a large percentage of the country that doesn’t have access to a convenient recycling solution for their mobile phones and other personal portable electronic devices. We raised this money to help us deploy ecoATMs nationwide and help people recycle their old phones, tablets, or MP3 players, regardless of where they live.”

EcoATM plans to install an additional 600 to 700 kiosks by the end of the year. (Information about the locations of EcoATM kiosks is here.)

electronics recycling, mobile devices, EcoATMs,
EcoATM kiosk

The technology needed to recycle mobile devices is more complicated than you might expect. Each kiosk uses machine vision and artificial intelligence to scan, identify, and evaluate each device being recycled. Once identified, the kiosk checks spot prices to determine how much cash or store credit to offer for each trade-in. EcoATM takes a cut from each deal.

EcoATM says it resells about 60 percent of its collected devices and responsibly recycles the rest.

In a note last week, an EcoATM spokeswoman told me the startup had added technology that enabled its kiosks to accept tablets for recycling.

The company has deployed most of its kiosks in large shopping malls located in big cities. The new financing is intended to get ecoATMs into smaller cities and other areas where foot traffic is high.

EcoATM has raised more than $31 million in venture capital funding since 2008, when three out-of-work techies identified a potential business in recycling cell phones. EcoATM tested the idea with a prototype in an Omaha, NE, shopping mall in late 2009. Since then, the company says it has paid out millions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of customers, and has diverted hundreds of thousands of devices with toxic components from American landfills.

The company’s venture investors include San Diego’s Tao Ventures and Moore Venture Partners, along with Coinstar, Claremont Creek Ventures, PI Holdings, AKS Capital, and Koh Boon Hwee.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

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.