Meet the founder who wants to gamify your carbon footprint

Gilad Regev only needs to pose two questions to explain why climate-conscious individuals might want an app like Kora.

"Do you know your height and weight?" Regev asks me when I talk to him at the Sustainability Expo in London.

My answer is the same as for most people: Of course.

Then Regev continues: "Do you know what your carbon footprint is today?"

Again, my answer is the same as for most people: Nope, no idea.

And that’s the point of Kora – encouraging users to keep track of their own emissions by “gamifying” their individual carbon footprint.

Just like a fitness app can track your meals and calories burned, the Kora Sustainability app tracks things like your commute to work and then records your carbon footprint. Choosing a greener option like public transport is rewarded with tokens that can be traded in for rewards. And – if you’re competing against friends or colleagues – you also get points on a leaderboard.

“It’s like anything else: what drives the world today is engagement, gamification,” says Regev, the founder and CEO of Kora. “So why not in climate? It works very well in our wellbeing apps, in our sports apps. Same here.”

Compete against colleagues

Kora’s pitch goes beyond just individuals, though. The goal is for companies and organisations to get their employees to sign up to the app and then reward those who are consistently choosing more sustainable ways of commuting to work.

“We use leaderboards to keep you interested on a regular basis. People want to be the champion of sustainability,” Regev says. “So we take all these behavioural solutions and attach them to climate action.”

The Kora app currently focuses on tracking the user’s travel habits but will soon track energy usage as well with the help of smart meters. Future plans include tracking the carbon footprint of your purchases when it comes to things like food, fashion and consumer goods.

Users get one Kora token for every 100 grams of CO2 emissions they avoid by taking climate-smart actions.

Regev founded the company in 2021 after spending most of his career backing other founders. As a former investment banker, he says he made his first big investment in climate tech all the way back in 2004.

“There were not that many people around back then,” he says.

Kora has established itself in the UK, Germany, France and Sweden so far, but is growing rapidly.

“The idea is to be fully European this year, and then to start looking into North America next year,” Regev says.

Interest from Premier League club

The app is also attracting interest from some major players, including a top Premier League football club, Regev says.

“They want to understand the carbon footprint of fans arriving to the stadium on a game day,” Regev says. “Then you can create competitions and give discounts on merchandise or have meet-and-greet events, that is all based on which fans are most sustainable.”

A big Premier League game can have more than 60,000 fans traveling to the stadium, so the potential for a team to lower its carbon emissions is substantial.

Kora’s ambitions, though, are much bigger than that.

“We have even started to have a conversation with a country about accepting Kora for tax reductions,” Regev says. “It makes sense in any economic and social activity.”