UK startup Reboxed raises £500,000 to compete in the refurbished electronics market

Brixton-based sustainable commerce startup reboxed has raised £500,000 in pre-seed funding this year, including a recent round of £350,000 from angel investors. The platform just launched in September, kicking off the London company’s ambitious (and admirable) sustainability goals. The team says its mission to ‘rehome’ 100 million mobile devices by 2030 in an effort to tackle electronic waste. Not just that, reboxed says it will plant ten trees every time a phone is bought or sold (so that’s at least 1 billion trees in the next decade) — and pay to offset each phone’s lifetime CO2 emissions. Reboxed is up against some well-established competition, though. There’s BackMarket, the French company that raised $120 million this past May, and also Swappie, a slightly smaller player out of Helsinki, which raised a $40 million round in June.

The service works similarly to these other re-commerce players. The UK company will buy back phones from people who want to upgrade to a newer (but still secondhand) device, and then give a 15-month warranty on that upgrade. As part of the funding round, new investor Charlo Carabott is joining the board. Carabott previously co-founded and managed the UK’s leading mobile recycling website Mazuma, which he led until EcoRenew acquired it in 2018.

Photo: reboxed founders