Turning Business Actions Into Verified Impact featuring Trevor Laudate

Today's guest generates verified impact and real trust, making sustainability actionable one customer moment at a time. Welcome to The Connect Current, the flow of innovation in San Diego. We bring you the founders, investors, and leaders building the future across life science, tech, climate, defense, AI, and more. This is where San Diego's next chapter takes shape. Welcome to The Connect Current, the flow of innovation in San Diego. I'm your host, James Zanewicz, and this episode is being recorded at Kiln in Rancho Bernardo. When you're seeking coworking space, look no further than Kiln. Today I'm joined by Trevor Ledati, co-founder of Eco-Drive, and one of Connect's 2026 Cool Companies. Eco-Drive is a sustainability platform that helps businesses tie everyday customer actions to verified environmental impact. That can include planting trees, removing ocean plastic, supporting biodiversity, or other measurable impact projects connected to actions like purchases, bookings, email signups, loyalty moments, events, or more. What makes Eco-Drive especially interesting is the way the company connects sustainability, transparency, and business performance. The platform is designed to help companies create real environmental impact while also giving customers a clear visibility into the difference their actions are making through tracking, project updates, photos, videos, and other verification tools. That makes this a great Connect Current conversation because Eco-Drive sits at the intersection of climate, commerce, software, customer engagement, and trust. It is not about doing good alone. It is about making impact easier to implement, easier to verify, and easier for customers to understand. Welcome, Trevor.

Yeah, thank you, James. That was a great description. I'm happy to be here.

You can thank our producer Trey for that because he handles all that. I just get to show up and look smart. It's phenomenal. I figured. Well, for listeners who are meeting you and Eco-Drive for the first time, What is the company building? What problem are you solving? And why does that matter so much right now?

Yeah, I mean, like you said, you gave a great description, by the way, so I don't want to rehash too much of what you already brought up. But what we're really big on is transparency in the impact and cause space. And we started in environmental impact. You mentioned it, like tree planting, ocean plastic removals. Now we're going beyond just that. So we're working with nonprofits in the meal donation space, the education space, and far beyond to help them prove what they're doing on the ground to their donors, which in return helps them receive more funding. It helps them provide full transparency. I'm sure you've seen a lot of— there's a lot of fraud speculations in the nonprofit space, and there's quite frankly a lot of nonprofits out there that are doing things right. They just don't know how to show it to their donors and to the end consumers who actually care about this stuff.

Right.

And so Eco-Drive is the platform in between, helping both the business, the corporate donor, and the nonprofit prove where their donation dollars go across all of these causes. And our main goal is to just amplify the donations that nonprofits receive so they can continue doing their good work. And we're just a tech layer that helps them to prove that.

So when you talk to the businesses out there, is there, is there a common thread about where they feel the most friction around their sustainability and impact programs? Is it just the communication with the end user? Or what is that pain point that they see that you're helping with?

A lot of friction is the greenwashing and false claim lawsuits that you see. And that really ties back to the transparency of what they receive from a nonprofit, right? So let's take tree planting, for example, because that's been our bread and butter project from the jump. So if you go to a lot of nonprofits in the tree planting space, you'll give them, you know, $100,000 to plant X amount of trees and you'll get a donation receipt and maybe a certificate to show for it. Right? And some generic photos. The next month you'll get the exact same certificate.

Exactly.

Generic receipt, the same photos. And we saw this from working in the space at a different company before. And so we really wanted to fix that problem. And this is not a knock to the nonprofit, right? The nonprofit is not set up as a tech company and has only so many resources, and those resources should be going Towards actually planting those trees, right? So it's not a knock there, but we realize there's a problem because corporate donors need that in order to avoid greenwashing, in order to communicate their impact and effectively market it to customers. Ultimately, the reason why they're doing it in the first place. And so with Eco-Drive, what you'll get is you'll get timestamps, geocoordinates, photo evidence of every single tree planted through our platform. You could then assign that to those end customers that are shopping with you.

You over time, they support it.

Staying with you, and they can track it too. And what we've recently launched is a white-labeled version for nonprofits. Oh, instead of just competing with that nonprofit in the tree planting space who can't provide that, now we can empower them to better service their corporate donors and provide that themselves again, while they just focus on the good work that they're doing planting trees in the world.

Well, as you just discussed, the Eco-Drive was built around a pretty practical insight that companies wanna do something positive, but the traditional sustainability programs could feel expensive, complicated, hard to explain or didn't have the right information to convey. So what did you see out there that made you believe there was a better way to conduct this business activity with real-world impact?

Yeah, it's really just simplifying the whole process across the board, right? If you look at the underlying reason why a lot of businesses made sustainability claims or do a lot of their corporate giving, it has to do a lot of times with consumer pressure, or they think their customers or key stakeholders, employees, really care about that, right? And so in order to do that effectively, then you need, A, the transparency so that you can actually make claims around the impact you're making, but B, be able to market it in a tangible way at these different touchpoints. And so that's just where we made it really easy for them to plug it into their operating system, their Shopify store, their POS system, whatever they're making this impact for in the world, making it extremely tangible for that end stakeholder that's engaging with it, and then providing a bunch of marketing tools around that to actually help them drive— we call it ROI, which is return on impact.

Yeah. And when you're looking at that impact, you're tying that to customer actions, and that's a huge part of your model, whether that action be a purchase, a booking, a signup, or a business moment. So can you give us a little more detail on how the platform works tying those moments to impact and what makes that action-based approach so different from the traditional corporate sustainability efforts? Yeah.

So it's really simple. You sign up for our platform and we have 7,000+ direct integrations. So you just search. If you're a Shopify brand, you can search our integrations, connect your Shopify store, choose how you want to partner. So it could be donate a meal for every online order, pull plastic from the ocean for orders above $50, specific products, you name it, right? So it's really easy. That's true across a lot of different platforms, across every single industry. So I mentioned e-commerce a lot, but there's tech companies, AI companies, real estate agencies, a lot of businesses that partner with us across all of these industries. Right. And the way it's different and why we try and bake it to that like tangible 1-to-1 model is it's just much more powerful for the end customer. Again, The person that you actually care about sees this message, right? So if you think about how you've seen most business talk about donating, it'll be that they donated $100,000 towards Feeding America or something like that, which that's great. That's amazing. It means nothing for you as the end customer.

And where was your money spent? You don't know.

Yeah, exactly. And so instead, if that business says, with your purchase, we are Donating 100 meals with Feeding America, and then they follow up where you can track and see exactly who received those meals, when they got them. That is super powerful in that customer engagement. It helps boost loyalty. You would get that email after and be like, wow, I've never seen anything like that.

Right.

Right. And so it's really tangible. It creates a loyal customer for life after who's gonna go and spread the word and just be really impressed by what you're doing.

Yeah, well, speaking of the customer, they are more aware than ever of sustainability claims. I mean, you've used the term greenwashing, which is the horrible term we hear about a lot, but customers are also more skeptical than ever before because of things like that. Why is the verification such an important part of your model, and how do you help companies build that trust either out of nothing or back if their customers have had a negative experience before, potentially, instead of just making broad environmental claims?

Yeah, I think it's because I'm a skeptic myself sometimes, right?

Nice. So you come at it from that. Yeah.

Well, I, my background was working with a lot of for-purpose brands and we were donating to a lot of causes across the board. And one thing rang true was you get that same donation receipt and that's about it. And it's really hard to market that when you can't prove it. And so everything we do ties back to transparency and that importance. And really informing customers, hey, you will be able to track the exact impact that we're claiming post-purchase or post-stay at our hotel, whatever it is, and just trying to get them to buy in upfront. We always give the grocery store example, right? You've probably been to the grocery store recently and been asked to donate at checkout.

Yep.

Do you— I'm curious, do you donate when you see that?

It depends on what it is.

Okay. Yeah. So that's a no for the audience listening.

It's a no for me. No, if it's for kids, I often do. But if it's some other generic one, I don't.

Yeah, so that percentage of opt-in is typically around 6 to 8%.

Okay.

Right? Which is very low. And it tends to skew even lower with little information around there. There's a lot of factors that play into it, but every single person sees that and a lot of people choose no. The reason why is—

I'm sure most people are like, I don't know what it is. Yeah.

Yeah, and there's been a lot of interviews and a lot of studies done on this. why do you lean towards no? And most of it is because it's gonna line the nonprofit CEO pocket or the corporate's pocket.

Interesting.

To help them towards their tax write-off is the perception from the consumer. And being in that space, working with a lot of these nonprofits, that's not the case. These nonprofits are trying to do good work, right? They're well-intended. They just don't have the resources to send this through. And so there's this broken cycle in the space.

Right.

That's caused you and a lot of other people to look at nonprofits like they're trying to commit this fraud and they're really not. And so that's what we're doing here at Eco-Drive is really fighting that. We're trying to flip the switch, flip the narrative. There's displays at grocery stores, checkouts for our clients that are in grocery that will say, you will track your exact thing. They'll get a QR code on their receipt after—

Follow it.

That they can scan, they can track, they can see, hey, that $0.65 I just donated, I can now register, track, I'll get an email update, and I can track it in a profile when that impact actually happens. And that's something that's never really been done before. And it creates this trust now with the nonprofit, with the business you shop from. So it's great for the business, great for the nonprofit, because now that customer's like, wow, this nonprofit's actually— the money is leading towards outcomes.

Yeah.

I wanna give more to the nonprofit.

They're showing.

Right? And then also this business, claimed something and then they followed through with it. I want to support this business again. So it's creating this cycle that makes— I guess to go back a step, we're trying to drive mass adoption towards donating more towards nonprofits from both the corporate side and the end consumer side because of that layer of transparency.

And what do you see the end users, the customers respond to most when they actually see this, when they see the QR code, when they see the project? Like, what is the difference in their response?

They can't believe— yeah, they've never seen anything like it. We've done a lot of case studies on the end consumer. Yeah, we'll reach out to them and just be like, hey, what'd you think? Like, you registered this ID and you're tracking it on your profile, and they're just blown away by like the fact that a business even followed through that much, even before they even get the updates on, hey, your meal's been donated or your tree's been planted or Your clean drinking water has been provided. It's just cool for them to even have this experience where they know they're gonna be able to see it and there's some follow-through on what that claim was.

And are you seeing that kind of in all age brackets and demographics, or are there certain ones that are more attracted to kind of like the Eco-Drive model, or?

So I would say Gen Z, millennial, that shift is more trusting even.

Gen X is very skeptical. I know.

Yeah.

I'm part of it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. I didn't wanna, The X-Files.

We trust no one. Yeah, we were trained.

And then maybe that's where we see a lot of that. Like, wow, you're actually following through. Yeah, that's pretty cool. You know, there's still some like, okay, I see it, but how do I know like somebody else isn't receiving this exact same thing? Or how do I know this isn't BS? Which we have.

Especially with AI now, because you could make the same thing look different.

Yeah.

Without doing the work.

So that's where we embed into the nonprofit's operation a lot. And that's where they can— we provide them with tools to record this data so that it can't be double counted. It's all done via an app that collects photos, that collects timestamp geocoordinates, photo evidence that can't be duplicated across a lot of these different consumers that are interacting. So there's a protection layer all the way down through nonprofits. So we're fully integrated into this whole system from consumer to the actual work that's happening on the ground.

Well, Eco-Drive is part of Connect's 2026 Cool Companies. We talked about that before, and that's about highlighting startups with strong potential and helping them build visibility, relationships, momentum, and, you know, perhaps fundraise even. As you look at this next stage for Eco-Drive, what kinds of customers, partners, investors, or collaborators are most helpful for you right now?

Yeah, I would say we work in a lot of different layers here, right? So one is on the corporate side.

Yeah.

Attracting more corporate donors. These are businesses big and small who care about giving back, care about sustainability. Are interested in cause marketing. It could be CSR teams, ESG teams, or even marketing and brand leaders.

Right.

And that's the ROI side. So that's again across all industries. But if this is something that's interested, we'd love to speak with you and help you incorporate tangible impact that you can actually prove and market to your customers. The flip side is nonprofits. So if you're a nonprofit and You want to show your donors where your dollars go. You want an easy way to manage all of your corporate donations. You could do that through our platform, all at pretty much the click of the button. It's not any increase to your overhead, but it's really to help you manage your current donors and scale and attract more donations with this transparency and marketing model.

Nice. And are you fundraising right now as well for yourself?

We are kicking off a fundraise here shortly.

Nice.

Yeah, it'll be a seed plus round. It's all around scaling ImpactIQ.

Okay.

There's the concept is it's the AI infrastructure powering donations for nonprofits, really, again, with the focus on transparency and wanting to be the transparency rails across all donations. And we're raising $3 million to go out and accomplish that.

Nice. So ideally some impact investors who actually care about the mission as well.

Yeah, that would be awesome. I mean, we're in San Diego, which is a great area for impact tech. Scott Chisholm is an advisor for us. He was the CEO that scaled and eventually sold the GoFundMe of Classy. So we have a lot of good advisors in our corner. There's a lot of great peers that we have here in San Diego that are— have deep ties in the nonprofit world.

Nice. And we have one last question for you. It's our very Connect Current note. We want to know what drives your innovative flow, what gets your creativity going.

That's interesting. And that can be anything.

It does not have to be about tech or your company.

Yeah. So basically just where I find—

What spurs you? Yeah. Where do you, where do you find your joy? Yeah.

Where I find my most creativity and the most joy is getting my morning cold brew, listening to a podcast, and just the morning flow state where I don't have any calls lined up. It's about an hour from 8:00 AM to 9:00 when my first calls typically start in the morning. It's your time. Yeah. It's my time to just Do whatever. I typically block my calendar so I don't handle any tasks. I don't do anything like that. It's all towards just more of the creative side. Yeah, it could be a lot of different things, but that's, I think, what's—

So reset, caffeinate, and learn. It's basically, yeah, it's basically all just cold brew. I love that. I love it. That's fantastic. Yeah. Well, Trevor, I wanna thank you so much 'cause this was A, valuable, and B, fun. I think it's a great reminder that sustainability doesn't just have to be like a buzzword or sit on the side of a business. It can actually be a business when it's simple, transparent, and connected to real moments for your customer and can be a key part of how you build trust and credibility as well as loyalty and measurable impact. And EcoDrive's work really shows us how software can make environmental actions easier to launch, easier to verify, and easier to connect with. And we're thrilled to have you as one of our cool companies and really appreciate you taking the time to join us.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is a lot of fun.

Thanks for listening to the Connect Current. If you want to learn more about Connect and explore resources across San Diego's innovation ecosystem, follow us on LinkedIn or visit connect.org. We'll see you next time on the Connect Current, where San Diego's innovation story keeps moving forward.

This podcast was edited and produced by Resonate Recordings.