This past July, Karma Wallet, a startup that incentivizes sustainable shopping, announce a partnership with the entrepreneurship support hub Raleigh Founded.
Karma Wallet operates fully remotely, but needed a space for team meetings a few times per year. As a solution, the team started gathering at Raleigh Founded, which is a coworking space geared toward the Triangle entrepreneurship community.
It was also at Raleigh Founded, during a happy hour in January, that Karma Wallet announced the launch of a beta version of its product, which is a Visa debit card that offers incentives for environmentally and socially conscious purchases.
Jayant Khadilkar, co-founder and CEO of Karma Wallet, said Raleigh Founded is a very friendly and welcoming space. Both companies have B Corp certifications, which are designations for companies that meet certain social and environmental impact standards.
With this partnership, each Raleigh Founded employee gets a free Karma Wallet card and membership—which would usually cost $40 per year. Additionally, customers buying memberships at Raleigh Founded can use the Karma Wallet Card to pay for those memberships, and Raleigh Founded will give them 17% cash back.
As a B Corp certified company, Raleigh Founded makes sustainable decisions, such as purchasing compostable materials, buying from local businesses, and even instating a community garden. Executive Director Lauren Romer said partnering with Karma Wallet felt like “another step in the right direction.”
“We’re holistic about how we’re sustainable, and I think that Karma Wallet allows us to add another approach towards sustainability,” Romer said.
When Romer announced the partnership to Raleigh Founded’s team, she said employees were excited that Karma Wallet does the research about what companies are sustainable, rather than leaving card users to do that research themselves before making a purchase.
Karma Wallet’s Evolution
In 2020, when Karma Wallet was still primarily known as ImpactKarma, GrepBeat covered the startup’s MVP, which was a web app that monitored users’ transaction histories, producing an impact report—or “Karma Score”—to show which merchants were environmentally or socially conscious. After monitoring about 3 million transactions, Khadilkar said his team saw how habits were changing. From there, they began to monetize their idea, ultimately leading to the launch of the Karma Wallet Card this year.
“How can we give something proactive, something in consumers’ hands, that they can actually use while shopping?” Khadilkar said. “And, that’s where we went on this path of creating the debit card.”
With the debit card, customers can get cash back by shopping with the 18,000-plus companies that Karma Wallet has partnered with. There are additional benefits that serve to offset less environmentally friendly purchases (for instance, Karma Wallet donates to reforestation efforts when you use the card to fill up your gas tank) or reward responsible shopping (the company donates a meal to a community fighting hunger when you use the card to support a local restaurant).
Earlier this year, Karma Wallet also acquired a marketplace which gives cardholders access to an additional 150 environmentally and socially conscious merchants. By using the Karma Wallet Card on this marketplace, customers get free shipping and 10% cash back.
Productive Partnerships
Even before its recent announcement concerning Raleigh Founded, Karma Wallet had had a busy year establishing meaningful partnerships for its users.
In February, the startup announced a partnership with Ndustrial, which is a Raleigh-based company focused on reducing energy waste (and which GrepBeat has written about in the past). A company that uses Ndustrial can reward its employees for certain achievements by loading money directly onto their Karma Wallet cards.
The startup has also recently secured several other partnerships, including with insurance company Palomar. Karma Wallet Card customers can receive a direct deposit from Palomar onto their cards to help cover living expenses in the event of a property insurance claim.
More broadly, Karma Wallet has also set up a program called “Karma Collective,” which partners with about 30 companies that are directly linked to the card. Rather than making a purchase through the Karma Wallet app, customers can use the Karma Wallet Card at one of these independent merchants and still reap the benefits of the purchase.
What these partnerships make clear is that as Karma Wallet evolves, it is expanding its capabilities and inviting greater engagement. By continuing to link itself to companies in the Triangle, though—first with Ndustrial and most recently through the new partnership with Raleigh Founded—the startup is demonstrating the lasting value of local connections.
