Category: TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION
Country: United Kingdom
Archipelago Ventures and the Circular Plastics Accelerator lead investment into Matoha, a startup using infrared scanners and machine learning algorithms to sort different fabrics.
By Beth Jones
10 April 2025
Matoha FabriTell technologyUK-based technology startup, Matoha, has completed its first phase of Seed funding to raise £1.5 million for its artificial intelligence (AI) powered material identification scanners.
The investment will go towards further development of the company’s handheld devices, which can be manually operated to scan and identify the compositional make-up of textiles in less than a second, according to Matoha.
These devices, which are designed to require minimal staff training, use infrared techniques, including NIR reflectance spectroscopy, to scan textile materials and interpret the results using on-board AI algorithms.
Currently, textiles recycling requires the separation of component fibres, with strict requirements about which types of materials can and cannot be recycled. Matoha’s FabriTell technology aims to speed up this process by allowing for quick identification of 10 pure materials and 13 blends, including cotton, polyester, acrylic, nylon, wool and silk.
The company has also developed equivalent technology for plastic identification, called PlasTell, which supports the identification of over 25 different plastics, including PEI, PET, PDVF, PP, silicone, and rubber.
Commenting on the startup’s ambitions, Hans Chan, CTO and Co-Founder at Matoha, said: “This investment will enable Matoha to take our technology to the next level. With this investment we can have a greater impact on processing end-of-life textiles. This will include improving the AI capabilities in sorting for recycling and reuse.
“We are also looking at automation which is essential due to the sheer volume of textiles waste. 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,” Chan added.
The equipment is manufactured in the UK by Matoha’s own in-house team, with a variety of devices ranging from handheld scanners that can be used on site or in the field, to in-built desktop scanners for industrial-scale waste sorting facilities.
Investment into material identification technology
The first round of funding was led by Archipelago Ventures and the Circular Plastics Accelerator, a Limited Liability Partnership owned by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), with additional investment from Conduit Connect, British Design Fund, and Fashion for Good.
Justin Guest, Founding Partner at Archipelago Ventures, said: “We have invested in Matoha because of their ability to generate significant traction, with customers attracted by their low-cost, fast and accurate identification devices. The investment Matoha has secured will see evolution of this core technology to a robotics solution that will unlock textiles sorting at scale.”
The second phase of this Seed round will look to support the automation and scaling of this technology, with aims to close the round in H2 2025.
Claire Shrewsbury, Director of Insights and Innovations at WRAP, added: “Moving to a circular model of clothing is critical with a growing global population, and to counter over production. Key is developing an automated and transformative way of sorting clothing for both fibre2fibre recycling, reuse and other applications.
“With Matoha, we see a cost-effective solution to this issue that will help enable more textiles to be effectively sorted and saved."
Courtesy: resource.co
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