Recycleye: $17 million for waste sorting robot from UK

The latest funding from the UK's Recycleyereinforces my impression: providers of solutions with purchased hardware are increasingly valued more highly than hardware providers. There are already many robotic arms and scaling quickly in the sector is more difficult than in waste management, for example. This is an industry that is under permanent recycling pressure. And this creates costs and therefore demand for an automation provider. Otherwise, the waste management industry is an industry with very special requirements, which is why SAP does not play a role here. Worldwide, the software of a smaller Munich-based specialist is primarily used.

7 investors, including a majorr, are investing in the software specialist

The aforementioned $17 million apparently came largely from American deep-tech investor DCVC. In total, the startup Recycleye, founded in 2019, has received US$26 million. Using FANUC industrial robots, Recycleye has developed image recognition software that can distinguish between different types of waste extremely quickly. Within 10 hours, 33,000 pieces of waste are to be selected in this way. i.e. 3,300 per hour - so it's a matter of seconds. Apparently, there are still sorting errors, which would not be surprising anyway in the case of contaminated parts. After all, the money is to be used to increase picking accuracy. Today, by the way, only 9% of the world's waste is recycled.

Gigantic amount of data

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 including plastics, aluminum, paper and cardboard.

Recycleye Robotics is the most accurate and efficient AI robot picking solution available in the world today. Items are scanned and identified at an unrivaled 60 frames per second. This is twice as fast as the industry standard and means that each item is seen an average of 30 times as it travels down the conveyor, with twice the chance of being accurately identified before picking.

Recycleye works with a growing number of waste management companies facing the dual challenges of labor shortages and rising costs, while responding to growing demand for high-quality recyclates.

An advantage in distribution will be that existing waste plants can be easily retrofitted.

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