The environmental impact of the fashion industry is increasing around the world, with over 93 million tons of textile waste produced annually, of which less than 1% is recycled into new clothing. Previous recycling companies have tried to tackle the textile waste crisis, but have been unable to actually recycle post-consumer waste reliably. This is because previous textile recycling systems required a well-sorted supply of textile waste for their chemical recycling processes. For example, a system that recycles polyester clothing will fail if even 1% of cotton enters their supply unexpectedly, as the unexpected cotton interferes with the polyester degradation and renders the contaminated polyester unrecyclable. However, textile waste is largely collected from thrift stores and consumer disposal, which means the waste is collected as unsorted material. Because these textiles are a variety of colors and materials, they cannot be recycled without labor-intensive and inaccurate manual sorting, resulting in recycling becoming prohibitively expensive. Ultimately, 75% of all textile waste becomes unusable for these recyclers.

Refiberd is the fashion industry’s sustainability solution, as the only system that can recycle unsorted textile waste. Refiberd’s textile recycling system first executes a quick presort of textile waste, creating categories assigned by color and estimated material percentage. The waste is then shredded and is further quantified through a spectroscopy and machine learning based algorithm, which results in quantified waste that is over 90% accurate within a 1% material range – a new standard in the textile recycling industry. The waste then enters Refiberd’s chemical recycling system which is able to isolate the cotton and polyester fibers to create new Refiberd thread.

By sorting textile waste in-house, Refiberd is able to source unsorted, bulk-collected textiles from existing textile collection facilities as their input, guaranteeing their ability to scale, unlike previous recyclers who could not depend on a reliable supply for their systems. The real breakthrough from Refiberd’s sorting technology is the ability to reliably quantify and recycle multilayered textile waste (e.g., a coat which has a layer of down sandwiched between two polyester layers), which historically has been the most challenging material composition to identify. Additionally, since they are sourcing inexpensive textile waste that is normally discarded, Refiberd’s thread is able to be up to 50% less expensive than cotton thread and up to 75% less than sustainable thread alternatives. By producing a thread that is 100% recycled from discarded textiles, strong enough to be used for new textile production, and cheaper than industry standards, Refiberd offers textile manufacturers the most sustainable and economically-viable thread in the industry.

More about Refiberd:

“Refiberd sews up $3.4M seed round to use its AI to tackle textile waste”  -Techcrunch 08/29/2023

“Sara and Kerry worked with us for months to dive deep into our company, technology, and market to already brainstorm entry points, ideas, and advice before we formally entered their portfolio. This process helped us establish trust and have a sense of working together upfront, which is truly the relationship we hoped for with our early-stage investors.” – Sarika Bajaj

Co-founder and CEO: Sarika Bajaj
Headquarters: Oakland, CA

Sarika Bajaj, CEO of Refiberd

Meet Sarika Bajaj:

Background: Sarika has a dual degree M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.S. in Technology Ventures from Carnegie Mellon University, where she also completed her undergraduate degree in Product Ideation, Prototyping, and Development. She developed a deep textiles engineering background from research she conducted at CMU, mainly through the IDeATe Labs under Prof. Olivia Robinson and Dr. Susan Finger. This experience was also bolstered by her previous experiences at Intel, where she was on teams that designed a projecting belt that was featured in Paris Fashion show and an electronic dress that was featured in the Netflix Show, Project MC2.

Sarika is passionate about using her interdisciplinary background to make a difference in applying the newest technologies to improve sustainability and labor conditions in the textile industry.

Why Start Refiberd? In May 2020, when we had first founded Refiberd, the textile industry was experiencing a massive scientific breakthrough – new recycling technologies were being developed for the first time that could recycle cellulose and polyester fibers, which would make up to 90% of all textile waste recyclable.

However, we were seeing these companies struggle with scaling their technology and realized quickly that they were all suffering from the same textile waste sorting problem; the companies could not recycle waste that was of unknown composition. As a team of engineers, we knew this was a solvable problem with the right combination of sensors and machine learning.

We also saw the tremendous impact that Refiberd’s technology could have to enable the future of textile production. By transforming local textile waste into new usable products, Refiberd could enable, for the first time, localized textile production by opening up raw material access, means of production, and local distribution models. Instead of depending on large, complex global supply chains to ship raw materials, Refiberd could allow different countries to use their own waste streams to support their own production industries – a prospect that was very exciting for us from a sustainability perspective and labor market enabler perspective.

Why Seek Venture Capital? With the deep technology base that Refiberd is developing, we knew we needed to leverage venture capital funding to first develop and scale our systems before generating revenue by actively participating in the textile recycling industry.

Why True Wealth Ventures? The True Wealth Ventures team has deep experience in the textile industry as well as working with hard technology-related problems, which was tremendous for us as that allows us to leverage their background to predict and work on problems that aren’t immediately obvious to us yet. Moreover, Sara and Kerry worked with us for months to dive deep into our company, technology, and market to already brainstorm entry points, ideas, and advice before we formally entered their portfolio. This process helped us establish trust and have a sense of working together upfront, which is truly the relationship we hoped for with our early-stage investors.

Have you seen women General Partners bring a different perspective to the table?  Absolutely. Through our fundraising process, we’ve found that female investors tend to be more interested in a variety of industries and have a more varied background across industries, which is important for us as we don’t fit the more standard VC SaaS company mold. Moreover, by having women General Partners, this means that this interest actually is carried through and reflected in the final investor portfolio – as they have the decision-making power to mold the portfolio as they see fit.

Do you think a woman’s perspective is valuable to this market?  A woman’s perspective is very valuable in this market – historically, the textile industry has often been considered as more female-centric given the major target audience of clothing and textile consumption. Therefore, a woman’s perspective in terms of technology development and, for that matter, funding technology in this market is critical.

Words of Wisdom: We definitely aren’t the first team to discuss how challenging the founder life is – the stress, the risks, and the workload are definitely immense. However, what keeps us going is that this is 100% a problem worth solving – a problem with real potential to do good in the world. We’d highly recommend founders find and work on something that they believe also has the power to do good.