AI-driven waste robotics company Recycleye has announced a $17m Series A financing round, led by venture capital firm DCVC, to enable the “scaling of technology set to revolutionise” global waste management.
Recycleye uses AI-powered waste-picking robots to lower the cost of sorting materials and the new investment will be used to further improve the uncommon accuracy of Recycleye’s sorting.
DCVC led the funding round, with existing investors increasing their stakes. Promus Ventures, Playfair Capital, MMC Ventures, Creator Fund and Atypical were joined by new Madrid-based investors Seaya Andromeda. The series A funding follows $5m previously raised in 2021 and $2.6m secured to date in European and UK government “innovation funding”.
Kelly Chen, a Partner at DCVC, called Recycleye a “quintessential DCVC investment” because the company uses deep tech to “fundamentally shift the economics and scale of the trillion-dollar problem of material recovery and recycling”.
The opportunity for applying AI waste sorting technology to the global waste management sector is staggering.
Recycleye’s technology combines computer vision and robotics to pick with more “consistent accuracy” than a human. Using proprietary AI models, the robot “sees” waste and is trained to pick an unlimited number of material classes, Recycleye says, such as plastics, aluminium, paper and cardboard.
Commenting on the announcement, Recycleeye CEO Victor Dewulf, said: “The opportunity for applying AI waste sorting technology to the global waste management sector is staggering, even when only 8% of waste is currently recycled.”
“With this investment, we can scale our operations to target a market which we estimate to have a SAM of $114bn globally today, but with the potential to increase by 14 times to $1.6Tr when the cost of sorting is reduced.”
