Austin's Smarter Sorting Raises $5 Million in Seed Funding
AI-based technology transforms the antiquated industry of incinerating consumer chemical waste, brings transparency
AUSTIN, Texas, March 8, 2018 (Newswire.com) - Today, after six months of rapid growth, Smarter Sorting announced it has closed $5 million in seed funding, including $2.5 million from RTP Ventures.
Smarter Sorting will use the capital to continue bringing data-driven transparency to the chemical waste management industry by further investing in the machine learning driven technology that has allowed it create a one-of-a-kind smart chemical database.
Smarter Sorting’s tech gives municipalities, retailers and waste management companies the ability to accurately identify, categorize and sort every class of chemical-containing product, creating new waste to value supply chains in the process.
The effective result is that consumer chemical products that had long been incinerated as waste are again viewed as commodities. These commodities are then used or recycled.
"We already have a world-class team of technologists and data scientists led by the minds behind Wolfram Alpha. This funding will allow us to scale, bringing our AI powers and vertically integrated reuse and compliance platform to North America's largest retailers and most innovative municipalities. In the end, the support of these firms and the cash infusion means we have a tremendous opportunity to accomplish our core mission: Increasing reuse and bringing data-driven transparency to an opaque industry previously characterized only by disposal and incineration," said Chris Ripley, CEO of Smarter Sorting.
“RTP Ventures is comprised of world-class technologists (with expertise in the Internet of Things including startups HYPR and Owlet). They are a great partner for Smarter Sorting as they are led by a true computer science guru with an amazing ‘get it’ factor. The fit is natural since they develop ground-breaking technologies like ours.”
Smarter Sorting’s intelligent platform is currently being used by 15 municipalities across the country and by Canada’s largest retailer Canadian Tire. Everyone using it has experienced substantial savings, both in employee hours needed to sort the waste and in the actual reuse process itself – helping to solve the problem of 1.4 billion pounds of consumer chemical products being incinerated as waste every year.
About Smarter Sorting
Smarter sorting brings transparency and reuse to the incineration-only world of consumer chemical waste management. Smarter Sorting's machine learning driven technology solution allows municipalities and retailers to avoid categorizing used or dented consumer chemical products as waste. This effectively re-designates what used to be regulated waste as product, unlocking exciting new opportunities for reuse and helping customers achieve their zero waste goals. Because of existing compliance and disposal burdens, Smarter Sorting customers save money, increase staff efficiency and improve their compliance.
About RTP Ventures
RTP Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund based in New York City. We invest in companies that create applied solutions for concrete problems for financial services and healthcare using IT and IoT technologies as a foundation. These companies almost always provide B2B products and usually deliver these products as SaaS. We prefer to invest in companies that locate themselves close to their customers (which usually means not in Silicon Valley). Our portfolio includes a number of investments with part of the team overseas and headquarters in the U.S.
Media Contact:
Jennifer Gooding
PRIME|PR
310-927-1829
jgooding@prime-techpr.com
Source: Smarter Sorting