Estonian startup Woola has raised €2.5 million to carry forward its project that helps end the use of fossil fuels by replacing protective plastic packaging with sustainable alternatives made from wool.
- The new round of funding will be used to expand the startup’s sales and marketing team, and grow its product offering for the luxury and ecommerce markets.
FUNDING: The funding is led by Metaplanet and followed by Future Ventures and Lemonade Stand, both investors in Woola since 2021, as well as new angel investors.
- Metaplanet is the investment fund of Jaan Tallinn, one of the four founding engineers of Skype. The fund invests in innovations with the potential to generate outsized returns for the benefit of humanity.
THE CONTEXT: More than 140 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced every year, of which only about 14% is collected for recycling, and an even smaller fraction is actually recycled.
- About 200,000 tonnes or up to 90% of sheep’s wool is burned or buried in countries across Europe because it’s too coarse for the textile industry.
- Woola, founded in 2020, is tackling both problems by creating protective wool packaging to replace plastic.
AWARDED: Earlier this year, Woola won the LVMH Innovation Award in the “Sustainability and Greentech” category and joined the Group’s business accelerator La Maison des Startups.
WHO SAID WHAT:
We founded Woola to help end the use of fossil fuels. We replace protective plastic packaging with sustainable alternatives made from wool that work just as well, but look much better. Two Houses of the LVMH Group are already using Woola packaging to replace plastic, and we are implementing a circular pilot programme with one of them. We are proud to be working with a Group that, with its Maisons, is reinventing the codes of packaging to ultimately ban fossil-based plastics.
— Anna-Liisa Palatu
CEO and Co-founder
Woola
Beauty often lies in simplicity. Woola is rescuing a natural resource—sheep wool—from ending up in landfills and using it to help retailers, from ecommerce to the top companies in the world of aesthetics, reach their sustainability targets. All of this is done via a product innovation cycle and a quick feedback loop with the customers.
— Rauno Miljand
Managing Partner
Metaplanet
