To help professionals control their data consumption and control their carbon footprint, the start-up Fruggr offers an automated calculation tool capable of measuring in real time the environmental and social impact of companies’ online activities.
Digital4Better, the company behind the Fruggr.io platform, launched its activity in June 2020, when online usage exploded with the Covid-19 pandemic. Two years later, she completed a fundraiser of 2 million euros to boost her activity. Since the tool was put on the market, the observation has been clear: “The environmental score is bad, all sectors combined,” Frederick Marchand, CEO of Fruggr, told ZDNet.
In this area, everything remains to be done. To build its tool, the impact start-up started by selecting 40 environmental and social criteria, such as carbon emissions, GDPR compatibility, inclusion or even eco-design.
The Fruggr model is based on the calculation of “hard data”. Certain quantifiable elements such as the lifespan of the equipment, the average weight of a page and the consumption of CO2, among others, are integrated without difficulty into the software, explains Frederick Marchand. However, other criteria are more difficult, such as the ethics of an algorithm, he concedes.
Scalable scoring
“This inventory exercise is accompanied by an effort to prioritize data,” adds the CEO. This organization work is key: the clearer the design, the more the end user will be able to clearly read the results and draw conclusions to take action.
The platform operates on large volumes, for large accounts able to repeat the process at regular intervals. “More than making a static report, we wanted to produce a dynamic and renewable result several times a year”, he specifies.
Once the performance indicators have been scrutinized, the platform provides customers with areas for improvement to achieve their CSR objectives. Digital4Better has, in parallel, a service activity to help companies take action, by providing them with advice on design and development.
Before attacking the professional market, Fruggr had started by developing a free consumer application to calculate mobile data consumption. This idea had germinated in the wake of the anti-waste law, which requires ISPs and mobile operators to communicate on the amount of data consumed and the equivalent of the corresponding greenhouse gas emissions.