Why We Invested in CurbWaste: A Startup Poised to Transform the Waste Management Industry

Flourish invested early in embedded finance at the infrastructure level (with fintech startups like Unit) and at the services level with portfolio companies such as ShopUp that were at the start of the embedded finance revolution. Over the past few years, we researched several other verticals that are starving for technical innovation and are facing painful challenges with market fragmentation, slow technology adoption, and operational and stakeholder complexity, among other headwinds. Operators in these verticals – who often wear the hat of a CEO, CFO, head of sales, and more – are in great need of a unified business operations workflow system tightly coupled with embedded financial products.  

Standout vertical SaaS players like Toast, Shopify, Procore, ServiceTitan and Mindbody offer elegant workflow solutions that can be particularly sticky. An integrated software operating platform that includes communications, scheduling, and workflow automation serves as a foundation for businesses capturing critical data across their customer base. Vertical players leverage data insights to offer relevant financial services such as billing, payments and lending in order to deepen relationships, improve retention and customer engagement and increase long-term value. As evidenced by Shopify (lending) and Toast (payments), financial services drives majority of the revenue for these leading vertical saas leaders.

Waste Management: An Ideal Vertical SaaS Opportunity

Waste is a privatized utility that every business and household in the U.S. contributes to and pays for on a daily basis. The complexity of the waste workflow and its disparate stakeholders only increases as environmental agencies push for waste tracking, reporting and management. According to Grand View Research, the 2021 U.S. waste management market reached $314 billion for collection, transportation and disposal.

The waste management market employs an estimated 3.6 million waste-hauling drivers across the country with the majority being managed by small, family-owned enterprises, operating their businesses over multiple generations. Despite attempts by earlier generations to enhance efficiency, initial software offerings in the waste sector failed to meet present-day requirements of modern waste haulers. Legacy software solutions for waste management are challenging and costly to onboard. They lack comprehensive functionality, exhibit subpar user experiences since most were created when offline, non-cloud solutions were the only option.

A Founder with Waste Management Expertise

We met CurbWaste Founder and CEO Mike Marmo in early 2023 and were immediately struck by his rare combination of deep sector expertise, start-up hustle, humility and high emotional intelligence. As a fourth-generation business owner, Mike knew first-hand the operational requirements needed to run a successful waste management business. He built a team of seasoned executives with complementary operational and product expertise in vertical SaaS, embedded finance, customer success and operations. Vach Hovsepyan, CurbWaste’s COO and co-founder, previously led customer success at ServiceTitan, a leading vertical SaaS platform that has successfully offered embedded financial services at scale. Another long-time ServiceTitan veteran with vertical SaaS product expertise and financial acumen, Eftichi Goumas, is CurbWaste’s Vice President of Product. Ashley Patel, CurbWaste’s co-founder and Chief of Staff, formerly led operations at a waste management business.

CurbWaste’s vision is to transform the waste management industry by utilizing its cloud-based and data-driven software solution to automate workflows, increase transparency and digitize operations to ultimately provide full transparency from waste generation through to end use. Their initial focus is to provide a robust and comprehensive workflow, customer communications and payments platform that integrates into a core accounting system for small to mid-sized waste haulers and transfer stations.  

With CurbWaste’s platform, waste haulers and transfer stations can 

• Optimize their operations in real time. 
• Manage tasks, online ordering, invoicing, payments, assets, and customer tracking through its cloud-based platform and mobile app. 
• Conduct remote management of driver routes, inventory tracking and order processing.
• Efficiently manage ESG reporting requirements and compliance needs as regulatory mandates evolve.
• Optimize pricing, routes, transactions and communications logistics across customers and their stakeholders.

CurbWaste has achieved a clear product-market fit with customers achieving 15% increased revenues via same-day orders and 20% improvement in cash flow with automated payments. In the past 11 months, CurbWaste’s annual recurring revenue grew 900% and is processing millions in monthly transactions for its customers. The company is replacing up to six single-function point solutions for some of its customers. 

And, with more than 70 haulers and 15 transfer stations using its platform, CurbWaste is well on its path to becoming a vertical SaaS player to watch. We are beyond excited to partner with the CurbWaste team and our fellow co-investors, TTV Capital, B Capital Group and Mucker Capital on this exciting journey!