Meet the Founders - HumanForest
Pioneering sustainable transport and mobility in our cities.
The Conduit Connect is proud to support the most passionate and innovative founders in the start-up ecosystem. To bring their stories to life, we have launched the ‘Meet the Founders’ series. For our first issue, we caught up with Agustin Guilisasti and Caroline Seton, co-founders of HumanForest, the London-based e-bike company. Read on to learn about their sources of inspiration, the life mottos they swear by, and the songs that keep them moving…
Describe your start-up in two sentences
A social impact & digital marketing mobility App. Connecting companies with consumers and their employees through free minutes on our e-bikes, available across Central London.
What gave you the inspiration?
AG: Fresh from a trip to the Amazon with my Cabify teammates, the destruction of the Amazon was burned in my mind. I was struck by the rainforests’ vastness, beauty and vital importance to the entire planet. However, back in the city I felt removed. I decided I needed to find a way to remind people of the Amazon rainforest, the protector of our planet.
At the same time, I was becoming frustrated by the limited and expensive mobility solutions available to me. I noticed more cycle friendly spaces being created across the city, but limited operators offering the type of affordable and sustainable shared e-bikes I wanted to use.
With this, the HumanForest I was pine-ing for (excuse the pun) was born. HumanForest brings the forest to the city but a different kind of forest, where humans are the trees. By choosing an e-bike and the sustainable transport choice, humans avoid emitting CO2 and they become, in essence, a HumanForest. I believe that if we offer cities easy ways to reduce their carbon footprint, we can all play our part in creating a more sustainable future.
How did you meet?
CS: Agustin is the glue among the three co-founders. He’s known both Mike and me for over 10 years. Agustin has always admired Mike’s work and tried multiple times to convince him to leave Rip Curl and join him at Cabify. The allure of a skating and surfing brand was too strong for Mike, that is until Agustin told him about HumanForest and the rest is history.
I was ready to leave the corporate world and focus on social impact businesses, I loved the idea of HumanForest from the outset and it’s been a great way to channel the skills I developed into a social purpose business.
What has been your greatest success to date? And your greatest challenge?
AG: Growing Cabify Chile from nothing into one of Cabify’s most important markets is my greatest achievement to date. Today Cabify Chile employs close to 100 people with more than 50,000 drivers, providing quality mobility to more than 3,000,000 Chileans. We were also the first mobility company to offset our footprint. I am incredibly proud of our successes at Cabify. The HumanForest model is a natural evolution of the times we are living in and the changing needs of users and companies.
At Cabify, my first and biggest challenge was optimising the number of drivers needed to ensure we delivered a reliable service for users that was superior to the competition. We spent months modelling, trialling, analysing and stress testing alternatives. We ended up breaking the current paradigm in the industry and scaled the fleet on a fixed salary, allowing us to grow our business by 10x. This then created enough liquidity to revert to a variable salary, reducing our costs by 30%. This might sound like a problem easily solved by the tech and data we’re now able to harvest, but this was almost 10 years ago, and micro-mobility was still an emerging business.
“HumanForest gets $2.3M from Cabify founders and others to grow a ‘free’ e-bike sharing service”
When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up?
AG: Stock broker
CS: Meteorologist
If you weren’t doing this, what would be your plan B?
AG: I would look for something within the mobility field, I am passionate about the industry and its potential to create positive environmental and social change.
CS: Sustainable outdoor clothing line. Being outside is my natural habitat and I’d use materials taken from the sea to create a clothing line, reminding us to respect the outdoors and mother nature.
What would you save in a fire?
AG: I wouldn’t think to take anything material, just my family.
CS: My two children, a painting my parents gave me and an old quilt from university days.
Who is your role model?
AG: My grandfather taught me a lot, but two of the most memorable were – details change the world and keep your feet on the ground.
CS: My mum – she taught me that nothing worthwhile was ever going to be easy.
What is your happy track?
AG: Hard question, I don´t have a specific one and it depends on my mood but at the moment it’s Harvest Moon.
CS: You want the sun, Niki & The Dove
What’s your motto?
AG: Everyone at HumanForest lives by the motto “Let’s keep pushing and change the world.”
What are you most looking forward to in 2021?
CS: I know I can speak for both of us when I say that our launch in Spring is top of the list.
If you are interested to learn more about how you can support HumanForest, please contact us at info@theconduitconnect.com