Investors see potential in textiles scanners
A UK-based start-up that enables textiles sorting with AI-powered material identification scanners has closed a £1.5 million funding round.
Matoha has developed manually operated devices that scan and identify the compositional make-up of textiles in less than a second.
Manufactured in the UK, the devices range from handheld scanners that can be used on site or in the field, to in-built desktop scanners for industrial-scale waste sorting facilities.
Hans Chan, CTO and co-founder at Matoha, said, “Current automated solutions are hugely expensive and too big in scale for the majority of businesses. Our strategy is to offer our customers more nimble, high-performance and economically reasonable automation systems.”
The investment round was led by Archipelago Ventures and the Circular Plastics Accelerator with additional investment from Conduit Connect, British Design Fund and Fashion for Good. The second phase of this seed round will support the automation and scaling of Matoha’s technology via AI-driven robotic solutions and is moving to a close in the second half of this year.
Claire Shrewsbury, director of insights and innovations at WRAP, added: “Through our work with Textiles 2030 spanning the entire supply chain, from manufacture and sales through to recycling, we see firsthand the challenge identifying textiles at end of life presents. With Matoha, we see a cost-effective solution to this issue that will help enable more textiles to be effectively sorted and saved."
Image: Matoha’s co-founders Martin Holicky, Hans Chan and Lieve Vanrusselt
