Turning Rubbish Into a Very Valuable Software Business
Wastedge | Consensus GreenTech Award Winner 2013
Waste isn't glamorous. But commercially, that can be precisely the point.
Behind every truck collecting a bin, recycling facility processing materials and waste company servicing thousands of customers is an enormous logistical operation.
Routes.
Customers.
Contracts.
Vehicles.
Weights.
Billing.
Compliance.
Data.
And Australian technology company Australian Software Professionals (ASP) saw an opportunity to put software at the centre of it.
The result was Wastedge — a cloud-based software platform built specifically for the waste and recycling industry.
In 2013, that technology was recognised with a Consensus GreenTech Award.
Three years later, it attracted the attention of one of the world's major waste technology companies.
An Industry Most Software Companies Overlooked
Some of the strongest technology businesses aren't built by trying to serve everybody.
They're built by understanding one industry exceptionally well.
ASP had accumulated more than 25 years of experience in waste technology consulting, implementation and support, developing deep expertise in the peculiar operational requirements of the sector.
Wastedge turned that knowledge into a cloud platform designed around the day-to-day realities of waste businesses.
And that specialisation ultimately became strategically valuable.
Going Global
In December 2016, Ireland-based AMCS Group announced it would acquire Australian Software Professionals, the company behind Wastedge.
AMCS was already building an international position as a specialist provider of software and technology to the waste and recycling sector.
The acquisition didn't simply give it another piece of software.
It brought an experienced Australian team, decades of industry knowledge and Wastedge's cloud technology into a growing international platform.
AMCS's own corporate history still records the 2016 Australian acquisition specifically as the purchase of ASP, “the company behind the Wastedge cloud-based waste software services business.”
That's a particularly satisfying outcome for a technology recognised through the Consensus GreenTech Awards only three years earlier.
There Is Value in the Industries Nobody Thinks Are Sexy
Wastedge is a brilliant founder story because it challenges one of the assumptions surrounding technology entrepreneurship. Your startup doesn't have to be the next social network. It doesn't have to appeal to millions of consumers. And it certainly doesn't need to operate in an industry people describe as exciting.
Sometimes enormous commercial value is created by understanding an unglamorous industry better than anybody else and building technology specifically for it.
Waste has to be collected.
Customers have to be billed.
Fleets have to operate.
Materials have to be tracked.
And increasingly, businesses have to demonstrate what happens to the resources they collect.
Those problems aren't disappearing.
Which makes the software solving them incredibly valuable.
Wastedge built technology for rubbish.
A global technology company saw the value in it.