Sometimes, it seems like every possible on-demand service that could be created has already come along — and, in some cases, gone away. But Recycle Track Systems (RTS), a two-year-old, New York-based waste and recycling management technology company, serves to remind that there remain plenty of opportunities for startups looking to turn our smartphones into lucrative businesses.
Indeed, while companies have sprung up around everything from on-demand family care to shipping, the waste industry — valued at anywhere from $45 billion to $65 billion when accounting for collection services, treatment and disposal — has largely been left untouched by tech founders.
That’s changing. Already, one company, nine-year-old Rubicon Global in Atlanta, has raised more than $145 million from investors that include private equity king Henry Kravis to steal away market share from incumbents like Waste Management and Republic Services. Now, RTS is aiming to do the same by making it simple for customers to schedule on-demand pick-ups through its phone app.
A high-tech garbage service may sound ridiculous to the uninitiated. But it’s no joke to customers like WeWork, Whole Foods and SoulCycle that have signed multi-year contracts in exchange for RTS’s flexible pricing options, along with notifications about when a truck has arrived and reports about exactly where their waste is being sent.
Investors like that it’s an asset-light business, too. Instead of purchasing its own trucks, RTS is partnering with a growing number of mid-size, independent haulers that it provides with feature-rich tablets to make their work more efficient — even when they aren’t being used in service to RTS.
RTS was profitable until a few weeks ago, in fact. What changed: the 17-person company raised $11.7 million in Series A funding from the Boston-based growth equity firm Volition Capital to hit the gas. (Notably, Volition was the first outside money into Chewy, a pet supplies company that sold to PetSmart earlier this year in the biggest e-commerce sale to date — ever.) Yesterday, we talked with RTS co-founder and CEO Gregory Lettieri to learn more about the company and opportunity it’s chasing. Our chat has been edited for length.
TC: Your business is centered around taking the guesswork out of the garbage-collection process. How did you decide this was something you could turn into a business?
GL: I met my co-founder Adam [Pasquale] about 12 years ago. We lived in the same apartment complex in New Jersey. A couple of years ago, I was working as a SVP at Bank of America, building tech portals for traders. Adam is meanwhile four generations in waste recycling; his father and grandfather before him [operated their own sanitation company]. One day, we were on a couch, watching a soccer game, and we got to talking about this idea and I think within 30 days we’d created the company.
TC: Is the idea to sort of complement the waste management services that are out there, or to replace them? Is this a service that’s focused mostly on customers who care about sustainability?
…