Every Barcelona resident has at some point encountered the option of paying a few extra cents on their purchase to donate it to a social entity. "Do you want to do the solidarity rounding up?", they ask when paying, and the process is as simple as accepting or rejecting it on the POS terminal. Behind this simple gesture is the Barcelona startup Worldcoo, which with this system has just surpassed 20 million euros raised for social projects.
These more than 20 million —specifically, 20,266,855 euros—, have been directed to more than 800 social projects, and have been collected through 79 million micro-donations. Now, the startup has this system in more than 5,000 stores that offer solidarity rounding up, which also has an online format and specific campaigns they carry out for ad hoc companies, as explained by its co-founder Aureli Bou.
The seed of the company was planted by Bou and Sergi Figueres in 2012. Friends since childhood, they decided to join forces to promote a solidarity project, bringing together their two careers: Bou was finishing his Engineering degree and Figueres, his Law degree, and they created the Catalan Association of Engineers for Development, which gratuitously developed engineering projects for social entities working in developing countries.
"However, we began to see that many entities could not carry out their projects due to lack of funding," Bou recalls. That's how they changed their perspective and focused on creating a project that would help entities raise funding through technology.
With this objective, they started with a crowdfunding platform for social projects, but they found that donors ended up being people who already knew the entities, "and the challenge was to reach more people and get new collaborators." For this reason, in 2014 they devised a new system: the solidarity widget for e-commerce, which allows donating a small amount before making an online purchase.
The next step was to move from online purchases to the POS terminal, to achieve solidarity rounding up when making card purchases. Achieving this required two years of technological development work and conversations with multiple actors: "We had to get many interlocutors to agree and align them all, from stores to payment gateways and terminals."
Since then, the company has been growing. During these years, it has closed various investment rounds, such as one of 2.3 million euros in 2016 and 1.3 million from the European Horizon 2020 program, until in 2023 Worldcoo was acquired by Glovo: "Then we were able to rely on all their partners, maintaining independent teams."
This reliance on the collaborators of the also Barcelona-based startup is driving Worldcoo's international expansion. After opening a delegation in Italy and starting to operate also in Portugal and Andorra, they are now looking towards Poland, where they do not rule out landing in 2025. In addition, the company is working to bring its solidarity rounding to more payment gateways that are not yet technologically adapted to the system.
In parallel to this international and technological expansion, Worldcoo is working to add more companies to incorporate the solidarity rounding system, as well as to manage collaboration with entities. With these, the startup signs fundraising contracts, through which it establishes a fee that corresponds to Worldcoo based on the amount it raises, and which ranges between six and 12%, "a low amount compared to street fundraising," according to Bou.
With this system, the startup expects to bill around one million euros, and estimates reaching break even in 2025. "We have had periods of the year in which we have already reached the break-even point, and we hope to do so soon also in the annual aggregate." To do this, the company will work to continue growing and to bring its solidarity rounding to more payment gateways, establishments and markets, and to expand its impact on social projects.