Their journey started in 2014.
During a Techstars Startup Weekend event in Bali, Febriadi Pratama, a geek, and Olivier Pouillon, who worked in the waste recycling sector for 20+ years, joined hands to build a startup community to help local schools with waste recycling. The community was known as CashForTrash back then.
As the ideas and concepts evolved, in 2015, the duo decided to bring in digital technology to improve the existing waste management system — not just in Bali but across the archipelago. They then rebranded the organisation to Gringgo, a wordplay of Green and Go.
“The motivation was to create a fun and rewarding way so that people pay more attention to the issue of waste management — one of the most pressing problems, but was largely ignored by people. There’s not enough data to better understand what’s happening on the ground. We realised digital technology could be a better way to get people involved and create awareness,” Pratama tells e27.
Pratama, who is also a startup mentor, describes Gringgo as a ‘tech for sustainable development”. A company dedicated to tackling sustainable development issues.
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Since 2015, Gringgo has leveraged digital technologies to solve the waste management issues in the archipelago with support from different organisations such as Google, USAID, and Coca-Cola Foundation.
The startup has developed an online platform and a mobile app for waste collectors.
It’s currently building an AI-powered platform to create a better system to help categorise different types of waste and their value. “This platform will allow households to understand better the value of their waste and, at the same time, contribute to improving the waste management system by making a behavioural change in separating the different types of garbage at the household level,” explains Pratama.
The company offers three products: Envi, SWAI app, and Gringgo Collect.
Gringgo Co-Founder and CEO Febriadi Pratama
Envi is a B2B product. In partnership with various waste collection services, Envi increases waste management efficiency by digitising the process to ensure less waste ends up in landfills. Envi provides a web dashboard and mobile app for administrators and waste collectors. Through this, garbage collectors can track the human resources available, schedule them, choose the most efficient routes, monitor check-ins, and also track the collected waste.
SWAI app — an abbreviation of ‘solve waste with AI’– is the result of its collaboration with Google.org in San Francisco. The app urges users to collect different necessary data through the utilisation of missions (gamification) and the token economy concept (users can collect points and redeem attractive incentives). It also provides users with educational content regarding waste segregation. Data collected includes types of recyclables, how much and where waste is produced. This data will then be included in the startup’s cloud database, used to train its AI model, and analysed to measure the impact and identify potential problem areas to create solutions for waste reduction and consumer distribution and behaviour.
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Gringgo Collect is a data-collecting platform. The app helps users digitise and analyse data collection activity.
Gringgo primary relies on a SaaS model, with various subscription options. It also seeks like-minded individuals and companies willing to support and believe in its quest towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) through grants, CSR, and projects.
Pratama admits that human resources and funding have been a challenge for the company since its founding. “We are always looking for grants, programmes and VC funding. We’re currently funded by grants and bootstrap money and haven’t raised any VC money yet,” he shared.
For human resources, Gringgo looks to collaborate with other organisations.
“There is not enough awareness about climate change in Indonesia, but it is growing rapidly. We hope to bring a transformation and help mitigate the catastrophe,” Pratama concluded.
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