![]() “Google has a very clever business model, and has the power to decide who gets visibility and who doesn't. “I realised that most of the money that I'm earning, I was actually giving back to Google for advertisements,” he recalls. The site supported his travels and gave him the initial idea to build a search engine as a way to support his mission. And it’s also really good to address climate change.”ĭuring his studies, Christian had created a website for comparing banking services if someone signed up for one of the services, he earned a commission. “I realised that planting trees is good for helping nature, it's good for helping people. ![]() “I realised this is the biggest challenge of humanity approaching us … and if nobody’s doing anything about it, then probably I should do something about it,” he says. It was also during these travels that he learned about climate change and saw the impact with his own eyes. “I saw the immense destruction that we’re doing to our planet, cutting down vast areas of rain forests for cattle farming or soy farming,” he says. He saw first-hand the poverty in which much of the world lives, and had to confront some ugly realities. He spent more than a year traveling, first in Nepal and then in South America during 20. The genesis of Ecosia came after Christian finished university in Germany. Among the many plaudits Ecosia has won, it was a finalist in the 2015 Social Innovation Tournament, run by the EIB Institute to help entrepreneurs tackles society’s problems. The company’s dedication to the environment, transparency, and ethics earned it certification in 2014 as Germany’s first B Corporation, which meets the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. Two years ago, Christian and Tim Schumacher, Ecosia’s co-owner, gave away their shares in the company to the Purpose Foundation, creating a “steward ownership” structure to assure that Ecosia can never be sold and that no one, including Christian as the founder, can make a profit or receive dividends from the company. Ecosia sells the excess energy back to utility companies and uses the money to plant more trees The rest goes to green initiatives like Ecosia’s seven solar power plants, which produce more than 200 percent of the electricity it needs for searches. But there the similarities end.Įcosia employees, including Christian, take salaries, but at least 80 percent of profits go to the mission of tree-planting. Like Google, the largest search engine by far, it earns money by selling advertising linked to searches. It has more than 15 million users worldwide. And we have the resources to dream.”Įcosia is the largest search engine with headquarters in Europe. We are now around 80 people, and I think we're making enough revenue to not only sustain the business, but also grow it. ![]() ![]() “We're really planting millions of trees every month. “It took us a while to get to this point,” he says of his social enterprise, which is based in Berlin. Growing from a sense of responsibility and an idea, Christian Kroll created a search engine called Ecosia with the goal of using the earnings to plant trees and fight climate change.Ī little over a decade and about 120,000,000 trees planted later, he still sounds a little surprised at how well it worked.
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