Glacier receives $7.7M to expand its AI and robotics in the recycling sector

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company Glacier, based in San Francisco, has raised $7.7 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Menlo Park, California, and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, with additional participation by AlleyCorp, Overture Climate VC and VSC Ventures, to name a few. The company also recently collaborated with Amazon to enhance traceability and recovery processes for recyclables.

In light of this partnership with Amazon, Glacier says it will use some of the funding to bolster its recycling capabilities. The company also will allocate a significant portion of the funding toward team expansion and developing its low-cost, high-performance AI-enabled robots, which are designed to streamline sorting recyclables while gathering real-time data on recycling streams for businesses.

Amazon’s investment is made possible through its Climate Pledge Fund and corporate venture capital fund, which earmarked $53 million for its Female Founder Initiative. Glacier is the second female-CEO-led company to receive investment from the Climate Pledge Fund.

“Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund launched the Female Founder Initiative, a program investing $50 million in female-founded and female-led climate tech companies, as well as supporting incubators and accelerators,” Nick Ellis, principal of Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, tells Recycling Today. “Amazon decided to invest and collaborate with Glacier to pilot a sortation project for novel biomaterials because their technology can help improve the quality of recycled content so that more postconsumer material is available for use in new packaging. Longer term, it can also enable recycling for more types of packaging and materials that are not currently recycled.”

In the news release about the investment and pilot, Ellis says, “Amazon is always looking at new ways to innovate on behalf of our customers, and plastic packaging is no exception. In order to build a future where new materials can be recycled at scale, we must test options to move these materials through the recycling system.”

“The diversity of Glacier’s team is an invaluable asset as they work to solve a problem as complex as the climate crisis. We look forward to supporting more companies like them through their entrepreneurial journey,” says Phoebe Wang, investment partner at Amazon Climate Pledge Fund.

“We’re excited by the progress we’ve made in the recycling industry, but to maximize Glacier’s impact on recycling, it’s essential that we work with stakeholders across the circular economy, including brands,” Glacier co-founder Rebecca Hua says. “That’s why we’re thrilled to collaborate with a sustainability leader like Amazon.

“Conversations about improving recycling often focus on the back end of the circular economy—building more and better MRF infrastructure. We agree that improving MRF infrastructure is a crucial step in recovering more recycled material. One of Glacier’s additional goals is to make MRFs’ jobs significantly easier and more productive by helping brands and producers at the front end of the process design packaging that is easily identifiable and recoverable by MRFs.”

The pilot will help Amazon understand the prevalence and recoverability of specific Amazon packaging in the recycling stream. “Glacier is building a first-of-its-kind AI model to identify these packaging formats in the MRF environment," Hu adds. "We are using Glacier’s technology to assess the traceability and recoverability of this packaging from the recycling stream.”

Using advanced AI capabilities, Glacier says it can identify more than 30 different materials, spanning from broad categories such as plastic bottles and aluminum cans to specific items such as toothpaste tubes and cat food cans. Glacier’s robots sort a similarly wide array of items, including grocery bags and trash bags, which can be difficult to sort using traditional screening technology used in recycling facilities. 

“When we started Glacier, we spoke to dozens of MRF operators across the U.S.,” Hu says. “They frequently told us that existing sortation solutions were too expensive, difficult to install and expensive to maintain and repair. At Glacier, we’ve designed the world’s first sorting robot that’s purpose-built to solve these exact pain points. Because recycling sortation is such a difficult and specific use case for robots, our unique design lets us optimize for the performance and reliability features that matter most to MRF operators.”

Glacier says its technology is made for ease of deployment as its robot occupies the same footprint as a person and can be installed with no facility downtime and no heavy machinery. The company adds that MRFs can see a return on investment (ROI) within less than one year.

“Glacier’s robot balances cost and performance to achieve as little as a six-month payback period with best-in-class reliability,” Hu says. “Our goal is to be the highest-ROI and easiest-to-implement robot on the market.”

Glacier plans to hire personnel across its engineering, deployment and sales teams and to continue improving its technology to sort more material at higher efficiency. “For example, we’ve developed a proprietary solution to sort plastic film and decontaminate fiber lines with best-in-class uptime. The additional funding will help us continue to expand our technology’s capabilities, as well as help us scale to more customers across the country," Hu says.

“Glacier’s team is applying cutting-edge robotics and AI to a massive real-world problem in a uniquely resourceful way,” says Abe Murray, general partner at AlleyCorp. “As an investor specializing in robotics and deep tech, I can attest that building reliable custom industrial automation in just a few years is incredibly difficult. Glacier’s impressive technological expertise, relentless drive, and creative spirit have enabled them to do just that.”

The funding comes on the heels of a notable year for Glacier, which was accepted into Elemental Excelerator's 12th cohort, joining 15 startups dedicated to reimagining climate solutions across various sectors. Additionally, Glacier secured a significant grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, supported by The Recycling Partnership, the Carton Council and the Foodservice Packaging Institute, to deploy several units in the Detroit area.

"We are excited to continue supporting Glacier's mission of eliminating waste by automating recycling with AI and robotics," says Ann Bordetsky, a partner at NEA. "Glacier's market-leading technology not only enhances recycling efficiency but also paves the way for companies across industries to understand the efficacy of their sustainability initiatives."

“Waste is a significant climate issue that’s not being solved quickly enough, and we believe we’ve developed the right technology to solve it,” Glacier co-founder Areeb Malik says. “Our breakthrough lies in designing purpose-built machinery tailored to solve the needs of the recycling industry.”