Tree simple steps to fight climate change

“Almost everyone is aware of climate change, but most don’t know what they can do to fight it,” say Godefroy Harito and Jules Buker, who built a tree-planting business to change just that conundrum.

The entrepreneurs, who met while studying at London Business School, reckoned there were three main barriers stopping people taking action on climate change: “that people don’t have the time, the money or know how to have an impact.”

Treeapp, the tree-planting, carbon-countering app they’ve set up as a result, aims to circumvent all those issues. Every time one of its 105,000 users download their free app and watch a minute-worth of adverts from one of the sustainable businesses Treeapp works with, it organises a tree to be planted in one of 12 countries.

“So anyone in the UK and Ireland can plant trees all over the world, every day.” The idea took off fast: “We grew our community to more than 100,000 users in the UK within two years, and that fuelled demand for corporate treeplanting,” Buker explains.

Firms who pay to advertise on the app include Hello Fresh, L’Oréal, and Allplants; some invite their customers and speakers to join Treeapp at tree-planting events as well as offsetting their carbon footprint. The founders then launched a B2B arm, enabling companies including DPD and Credit Suisse to directly pay for reforestation efforts.

The idea germinated when Buker, who is half-Turkish, read about Turkey’s effort of planting a record 11 million trees in one day in 2019. “A few months later, 90% were dead. I wanted to find a way to promote planting trees the right way and make it accessible to all,” he says. Consequently he and Harito gathered a board of tropical forestry experts to make a shortlist of projects for Treeapp. “Project selection takes three to six months,” Harito explains.

“We survey the type of species planted, project longevity, monitoring techniques, audit of accounts, social objectives and wider community benefits. We monitor sites through drone and satellite images over time and analyse the land-use composition.” The pair put in £20,000 to bootstrap Treeapp initially, hiring contractors to build their app.

Despite both still only being 26, the founders had entrepreneurial form: Harito worked on building crypto app Ziglu, which is in an on-off sale to Robinhood for $72 million. “It’ll make me some money, but I still have a drive to do other things that I’m more passionate about,” he says. Buker also dabbled in other start-ups, before working at investment platform Crowdcube.

The pair launched Treeapp on Earth Day, April 22 in 2020. “We had a wide range of marketing events planned — panel talks, expert speakers, launch parties, publicity stunts. Then Covid hit.” Instead, they approached sustainability-focused influencers with a collective million followers to create a launch buzz. “That helped reach thousands of people very quickly. It was a soft launch that grew much faster than expected.”

Apple’s App Store promoted Treeapp by naming it as “hottest app” and “app of the day”. In its first year, Treeapp hit 10,000 free subscribers, with user numbers tripling each year since. In 2021, the founders raised £265,000 for a preseed round, with backers including Jensons Funding Partners. Turnover is set to exceed £2 million this year; it has now planted more than two million trees across four continents in 14 countries, the nearest being a small, 5000-tree site in Northampton while the furthest is 100,000 trees planted across Indonesia.