Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital picks its horse in the recycling market, leading a $5.5m pre-seed round into AI company TrueCircle

The waste management industry is expected to reach $500bn* by 2025, as urban populations surge and governments incentivise the usage of recycled content in new products and packaging. With the recycling industry set for explosive growth in the coming decade as a result of these consumer, regulatory and fiscal pressures, the demand for (and price of) recycled materials is set to rapidly rise. Despite this, the recycling industry is thoroughly underserved by technology, creating an opportunity for startups to build products to support the scaling process. 

TrueCircle is an AI company deploying computer vision into recycling facilities, enabling them to operate more efficiently and profitably. TrueCircle’s vision systems can be retrofitted in under an hour and instantly provide facilities with the live data they need to understand their material streams. Facilities integrate this data into their operations and existing machinery to optimise their processes and ensure that they recycle higher quantities of valuable plastic and paper material.

TrueCircle’s technology has now been deployed into eight of the UK’s largest recycling facilities (including material recovery facilities or “MRFs”, plastic reprocessors and paper mills). Expansion into European and US markets is imminent with customers in those regions due to go live in Q2.

TrueCircle has also been building the much needed digital infrastructure to optimise the completely offline and ineffectual sales process used today by recycling facilities. The first customers are lined up to start using this platform to sell their materials in Q2.

TrueCircle’s cofounders are Rishi Stocker and Eamon Jubbawy. Rishi was previously one of Revolut’s first employees, where he spent 4 years running global partnerships. He started his career at Unilever where he witnessed the need for better recycling processes in their packaging operations. Eamon is the founder of Onfido where he built Europe’s leading Computer Vision team focusing on identity document verification and face matching. Having gone to school together 15 years ago, Rishi and Eamon came together in 2021 to build TrueCircle as a way to solve the world’s waste problem using AI.

The TrueCircle team of 20 includes the former Head of Robotics at Ocado and engineers from companies such as Tessian, Amazon, Skyscanner and Bulb.

TrueCircle has raised a $5.5m pre-seed round, led by Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital with participation from Passion Capital, Giant Ventures, firstminute Capital and the founders of companies like Revolut, Monzo, Infarm and Unity.

*https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-global-waste-management-market-size-is-expected-to-reach-530-0-billion-by-2025-from-330-6-billion-in-2017–growing-at-a-cagr-of-6-0-from-2018-to-2025–300947363.html

Quotes

Rishi Stocker, CEO and Cofounder

“Most people do not understand the value of waste,” said Rishi Stocker, CEO and cofounder of TrueCircle. “Almost 100% of recycled material B2B transactions happen completely offline today. In the absence of TrueCircle, the whole industry is suffering from complete lack of visibility on the quality of materials being traded. This has led to incorrect pricing, little investment in the sector and ultimately lower recycling rates. We’re confident that we can finally bring the recycling industry into the 21st century by building the data layer and trading infrastructure that it has been crying out for.”

Eamon Jubbawy, Cofounder

“The recycling industry is an important part of the fight against waste and climate change—but it’ll never scale effectively when it relies so heavily upon human operatives and outdated mechanical sortation devices. 

We built TrueCircle to bring decades of collective experience in computer vision to reconfigure this broken industry and build the definitive recycling company”.

Clay Dumas, Lowercarbon Capital

“Single-use plastic is a 300 million tonne scourge on our oceans and landfills that keeps the petrochemical industry in business. We backed TrueCircle because they’re harnessing technology and markets to build a solution that scales to the dimensions of the problem.”