Glacier, a startup that builds AI-enabled robots that help sort recycled waste at material recovery facilities (MRFs) across the United States, announced Monday it has raised a $16 million Series A round.
Ecosystem Integrity Fund led the round, with additional participation from existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, AlleyCorp, Overture Climate VC, VSC Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.
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Rebecca Hu-Thrams, the company’s CEO and co-founder, said the team plans to use the round to scale the business—she noted that Glacier has recently been receiving more inbound than it can currently handle, and by taking the next step, it can increase its manufacturing capacity further. Over the past year, she said, Glacier has increased that capacity by eight times.
“We’re really excited to put this funding to work to design and deploy increasingly [high-]performing, easy-to-install, low-cost, high-value ROI machines to further advance circularity for any recycling facility that wants that help,” she told Sourcing Journal.
The funding announcement coincides with another milestone for Glacier: the addition of another MRF customer in a high-profile city. The startup announced Monday it had partnered with Recology to bring technology into its facility in Seattle.
Beyond its expansion into Seattle and other new facilities, Hu-Thrams’ team plans to use the Series A to refine the technology behind Glacier; the robots that sort through waste in MRFs perform their duties with the help of AI models designed to identify specific pieces of waste.
That helps ensure that recyclable waste doesn’t inadvertently make its way into a landfill. To help the robots make such a discernment, Glacier has trained its current models on more than 3 billion proprietary images of waste collected from facilities throughout the U.S., which helps give the system a hyper specific understanding of the various materials that come through a MRF, Hu-Thrams said.
“We can tell you not only that something is a plastic bottle, but what the brand of that bottle is,” Hu-Thrams said. “We’re seeing that, as we add new layers to that AI detection, we can return increasingly rich data to help inform circularity decisions for our entire customer base.”
By adding more data into its models, Glacier hopes to make its technology even stronger.
The company works with corporate entities like Amazon and Colgate-Palmolive, with MRFs and with packaging producers—and when it onboards a corporate customer, Hu-Thrams said she likes to include recyclers in the conversation to help everyone get a sense of what’s needed to bring about stronger circularity outcomes from packaging, which starts with design of packaging.
“Our ultimate vision is, it would be phenomenal if we could get these producers working with our recycling facility customers on a national level. We know that recycling is ultimately a community or geo-specific activity, both in how it’s regulated and in terms of how consumers behave,” she said. “But we’re seeing that our ability to help create insights for these massive brands across the country also helps to inform their understanding of where the biggest opportunities to move the needle on circularity and better recovery are in the first place.”
Hu-Thrams said she expects extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation, which has already been made law in some states, like California, to further push brands to reconsider their impact and the at-home recyclability of their packaging.
“A lot of brands are already starting to grapple with how they’re going to measure and comply with a lot of these EPR regulations,” she said. “The most forward-thinking brands and producers we work with are already starting to use Glacier to start to understand that type of information about their own packaging portfolios, such that they can be prepared to act on it once those regulations are in place.”
When she thinks ahead at what else is on the docket for 2025, Hu-Thrams said she’s excited to bring aboard more clients; while she declined to disclose the exact number of brands, recyclers and producers Glacier works with, she noted that the company “has a couple dozen customers across the board” in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit. As Glacier works to strengthen its technology, it has plans to add new capabilities for MRF operators into the mix.
“The question becomes, how do you make it increasingly easy for all of your data users to make quick quantitative decisions?” she said. “[Recyclers] usually don’t have the time to be looking at a million-row spreadsheet and trying to make heads or tails of what that AI data is telling them. We’re now building out the layer that can tell them, at a quick glance, what they need to investigate or what they might want to improve.
