Recycleye, a developer of a solution for sorting dry mixed recycling with artificial intelligence (AI), has reported the closure of a US$17m (£13.8m) Series A financing round.
The funding round was led by venture capital firm DCVC.
The solution was developed to lower the cost of sorting through materials through use of AI-powered robots.
The investment will be used to improve the accuracy of Recycleye’s solution, with this following a funding round worth US$5m (£4.07m) in 2021.
The company has secured US$2.6m (£2.1m) to date in European and UK government innovation funding.
The system works using computer vision through a mobile phone-quality camera trained to recognise waste items on a conveyor belt.
Through use of AI models, the robot observes waste and is trained to pick of material classes such as plastics, aluminium, paper and cardboard and is reportedly twice as fast as the industry standard.
Rory Brien, general manager of FCC for re3, in Reading, England, says: “At FCC, we believe in being forward-thinking, so investing in the latest waste sorting technology was an obvious choice.
“Recycleye Robotics is delivering the consistent purity in sorted material and reliable data that we need to run an effective facility.”
Kelly Chen, a partner at DCVC, says: “Recycleye is a quintessential DCVC investment, using deep tech to fundamentally shift the economics and scale of the trillion-dollar problem of material recovery and recycling.”
The system was developed to operate 24/7, 365 days a year and, according to Recycleye,can pick up to 33,000 items per robot over a 10-hour shift.
