San Diego’s ecoATM, a maker of kiosks for recycling cellphones and other mobile electronics, has a new financial backer, with Cowen Sustainable Advisors taking a $200 million minority stake in the company.
Cowen s private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which remains the majority owner of ecoATM. A spokesperson declined to disclose the percentage of Cowen’s ownership stake or the valuation of privately held ecoATM.
The firm currently operates 4,300 automated e-waste recycling kiosks across the U.S., as well as 54 kiosks in the United Kingdom and . About 30 ecoATM machines have been installed in retail centers around San Diego.
Over the past three years, the company says it has added nearly 2,000 kiosks globally.
“The business has been growing really well,” said Yanyan Ji, ecoATM’s chief marketing officer. “We have been expanding in San Diego and globally.”
Cowen Sustainable Advisors is a division of Cowen Inc., a large financial services firm and investment bank. The fund focuses on green technology.
“That is exactly what we are doing,” said Ji. “We are a company born to develop green technology to solve the world’s e-waste problem.”
Since it was founded in 2008, ecoATM says it has kept 25 million cellphones out of landfills. Last year alone, it recycled 5 million devices. ecoATM employs 466 workers worldwide, including 280 at its San Diego headquarters.
In 2016, Apollo Global Management paid $1.6 billion for ecoAtM’s former parent company, Outerwall. After the acquisition, Apollo split Outerwall into three separate companies — Redbox, Coinstar and ecoATM.
Coming out of the 2008 recession, ecoATM was one of San Diego’s startup success stories. Publicly traded Outerwall acquired ecoATM in 2013 for $350 million. But it struggled to achieve expected financial results, which eventually led to its sale to Apollo.
ecoATM kiosks scan unwanted mobile electronic devices, verifies the identification of sellers and then provides cash. The company makes money by reselling used mobile phones to wholesalers or directly to customers through its Gazelle.com website and other online marketplaces.
“Our company is very profitable,” said Ji. “We just recently secured $150 million in debt from a major bank, and that only shows the confidence the banks have in the business.”
The company plans to use the debt financing to expand its kiosk footprint and invest in technology.
When the deal closes later this month, Vusal Najafov and Ewa Kozicz, co-heads of Cowen Sustainable Adivsors, will ecoATM’s board of directors.
“The Cowen team has a deep understanding of the potential of ecoATM and of the significant impact our company has on sustainability factors throughout the consumer electronics vertical,” said ecoATM Chief Executive Dave Maquera in a statement.
