What BeCause does

BeCause is a startup enterprise software company that enables sustainability data to flow simpler, faster, and cheaper. BeCause’s AI-powered Sustainability Management Hub frees up resources and increases revenue and profits, allowing travel and tourism companies to make a greater real-world impact through their sustainability efforts.

BeCause Current Landscape

The travel industry accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions, even as travel brands engage in sustainability efforts and consumers increasingly prioritize sustainable travel. However, it’s been difficult for brands to collect and communicate their sustainability data due to complex, manual processes. Between the inefficiency of present-state data collection and the missed revenue due to an inability to communicate sustainability credentials to potential guests, it’s estimated that current sustainability management processes are costing hotels alone $21B per year.

BeCause automates processes, reducing redundancies like double-accounting, and streamlining the transmission of sustainability data across travel brands, certification entities and distributors. One of BeCause’s differentiators is its “hub” approach, which allows data to be re-used synergistically across many workflows, actors, and stakeholders. This creates a connected, holistic ecosystem of sustainability management capabilities tailored to travel and tourism companies, which are often challenged by limitations on time, resources, and expertise. The BeCause solution simplifies complexity for sustainability managers and helps them do more with the time and assets available to them.

Company Birth Story

The idea behind BeCause and its mission for the travel and tourism industry began when company founder Frederik Steensgaard was just a child growing up in Oman. He had the opportunity to attend school with people from all over the world and explore the beautiful local coral reef. However, he also witnessed the unfortunate consequences of climate change as the reef began to warm up and disappear. Following the tragic events of 9/11, Frederik was inspired to make a positive impact on the world and promote social cohesion. He wanted to tackle sustainability problems and create a startup that could connect the supply and demand for sustainable practices. Frederik studied business, sociology, and entrepreneurship, gaining the skills necessary to build a successful startup.

While working at Demant Group, Frederik met Jonas Bruun Jacobsen, a software architect who shared his passion for sustainability and belief in the power of technology to connect people and promote sustainable practices. Jonas had also experienced the frustration of market failure preventing the connection between supply and demand for sustainable solutions. Through their shared vision and expertise, they founded BeCause with a mission to create an IT infrastructure that connects sustainability ecosystems and enables the tourism and travel industry to make a positive impact on the environment. They recognized that the industry could serve as a catalyst for change by bringing people together and fostering understanding and cooperation.

Team Culture

The company has assembled a team of accomplished professionals with extensive experience in sustainability, travel, technology, and business. They have also secured backing from investors with a track record of scaling successful platforms and formed strategic partnerships with influential players in the tourism industry.

The Solution

BeCause is committed to helping companies integrate sustainability seamlessly into their business operations by offering them the necessary tools and resources to manage sustainability data efficiently and leverage it to create competitive advantages. Despite the widespread interest in sustainability, facilitating reliable communication between travelers, travel companies, and certification entities remains a significant challenge. BeCause aims to facilitate successful connections while promoting sustainability in the travel industry. The company enables individual hotels to communicate their sustainability data automatically, in real-time to distributors like booking.com, making it easier for consumers to find and book sustainable stays.

BeCause’s proprietary technology consists of a refined mix of the industry’s most efficient mapping algorithms, the most complete data sharing infrastructure, workflow automations that understand sustainability management in and across organizations, and an A.I. assistant making tailored predictions and recommendations based on a uniquely comprehensive database of sustainability certified hotels (the world’s biggest, in fact).

A Customer Story

One of the world’s leading digital travel platforms, Booking.com saw firsthand the rising demand for sustainable accommodations among its customer base. It implemented the Travel Sustainable badge in 2021 to give travelers a transparent, consistent, and easy-to-understand way to identify sustainable stays at more than 95,000 lodging properties worldwide. Booking.com’s processes for collecting and managing the data that underpin its Travel Sustainable ranking were manual and periodic. They needed an efficient, scalable solution to collect data from accommodations certified by UN’s Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GTSC) recognized standards, among others. BeCause’s cloud platform replaced Booking.com’s manual processes with automated sustainability data transfers and mapped standards from 50+ certifications that align with GTSC criteria to the data provided by tens of thousands of individual hotel properties worldwide, providing a complete and accurate picture of the accommodations available on Booking.com.

“BeCause removes and moves resources to where we excel. We get real-time & accurate data that we put in front of our customers. Supporting the customers to make more informed decisions about their travel behavior.” - Thomas Loughlin, Sustainability Manager, Booking.com

A founder quote

“Too often, sustainability is seen as a burden, something challenging and costly for businesses to achieve, BeCause was built to challenge that perception, and by using advanced technologies and cross-sector best practices, we’re helping to make sustainability a no-brainer.” Frederik Steensgaard, CEO & Co-founder.

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See the article by Startup to Follow here.