On a family trip to India, Jagadesh Ambati was shocked at how broken the local recycling system was. After complaining about it to his wife, she challenged him to make a change. He eventually founded EverestLabs to help recyclers recover more on average than before.
Fast forward a few years and EverestLabs has achieved “high speed”, claims Ambati, customer deployments in North America, including SIMS Sunset Park in Brooklyn, one of the largest plant operators in the region. With its sights set on global expansion, Everest Labs today closed a $16.1 million Series A round, bringing the company’s total funding to $24.63 million.
TransLink Capital led the Series A with participation from NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, BGV, Sierra Ventures, Morado Ventures and Xplorer Capital. Ambati told TechCrunch that the proceeds will be used for ongoing sales, operations and product development efforts.
“The pandemic has been a blessing for us as we have had better time with customers after the initial lockdowns,” he said in an email. “As a result, we’ve perfected our solutions by doubling down on initial R&D.”
Everest Labs strives to solve an enduring challenge in recycling: making residential and commercial recycling plants more efficient. It’s Sisyphean. In New York City, for example, about one-fifth of trash is recycled — well below the theoretical maximum — partly because garbage workers are forced to complete long hauls, mixing recyclables with trash.
The EverestLabs solution is a combination of in-plant recycling software and on-premises hardware that identifies items on shipping lines and moves those items to the correct destination. Built over a three-and-a-half-year period, Ambati says its object recognition algorithms are trained using proprietary data sets as well as customer data and third-party data.
Image Credits: Everest Labs
“We are the first company to have AI software audited by a local city-run factory and their independent auditor at the point of reuse,” he said. “Everest Labs Robotics is the only company in recycling that guarantees select success rate and select effectiveness.”
Everest Labs sells services to control robotic sorting machines in recycling plants, along with a team of engineers who monitor metrics like efficiency and accuracy. The engineers provide maintenance assistance, which is a way for Ambati operators to focus on maintaining speed with the materials they receive and process.
“Decades of technology simply cannot sort recyclables. New robotic cleaning solutions are not efficient enough and are very expensive. Due to sub-standard working conditions and the regularization of tasks, human operators are working fewer and fewer shifts, resulting in higher costs for lower production,” said Ambati. “It doesn’t matter how much or how much we recycle in our homes and businesses. If we don’t do a good job of recycling materials; then everything ends up in landfills.”
Everest Labs is not the first to realize the huge market of recyclables. It features at least a half-dozen companies tackling the recycling hurdles from different angles, such as Glacier and Gongeye Technology — startups that use robotics and a variety of data sources to sort through trash. Closer to home, there’s Pure Robotics, a Colorado-based firm that machines materials from a single disposal point. UK-based Truckle uses computer vision to improve recovery rates and quality at recycling facilities. And then there’s AMP Robotics, which designs picker arms that pick up small, reusable materials and place them where they’re needed.
But Ambati — who declined to comment on EverestLabs’ earnings — said he was not seeing any slowdown in business. Ambati touted EverestLabs’ other clients, including Recology, Alameda County Industries and Smart Station, and said the startup is on track to double its 13-person headcount by the end of the year.
“The war in Ukraine and supply chain issues are challenging but we are working around it,” Ambati said. “We expect strong year-over-year growth with healthy fundamentals. Our burn rate continues to change as we hire many new employees.”
Whether technologies like EverestLabs’ can revolutionize recycling is still up for debate. According to the European Union Commission’s Joint Research Centre, more than 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during product design – highlighting the need for manufacturers to move towards sustainable designs. But the world’s waste problems cannot be blamed on design alone. Consumption patterns must eventually change – from things like plastic containers to compost bins and from plastic shopping bags to reusables.
In the meantime, EverestLabs and its competitors will fight an uphill battle.
