For Amy Ma, founder of Danu Robotics, this moment came after many years working as a software developer at a bank in London. It was a typical high-touch office in the financial industry. But despite all the perks, Ma was concerned when he noticed that the building’s recycling bins had been thrown into the trash.
“Even though they have a lot of money, they have different recycling bins and it just ends up in the same place,” Ma told TechCrunch.
The more she dug into the problem, the more serious it seemed to become. It wasn’t just her building. The overall economics of recycling often boil down to humans manually sorting the waste stream to extract different types of recyclable materials.
“When I saw the technology, I thought we could do better,” Marr recalls.
Now, she’s making a commitment to six-year-old Danu Robotics, a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, that makes robots designed to sort recycling more cheaply and quickly. Ma worked on the idea for six years and finally brought her version of the product to market. Her robot, named HERO, has several advantages over its competitors. For example, pick up items with pincers instead of a suction system. But the bigger difference is the business approach. Danu leverages AI to continuously improve its robot software.
This approach has already received some attention. Danu has letters of interest from two large customers and signed contracts worth $500,000. More importantly, the company has more than 200 customers in its sales pipeline, allowing it to tap into the $20 billion recycling separation market in Europe and North America.
On the back of that promise, Davnu raised $5 million in late seed funding to maintain commercial pressure.
There is already a robust market for robotic waste collectors, especially the suction-based arms offered by competitors such as Glacier and RecycleEye. But Ma believes the economics of recycling will make it easier for new competitors to prove their worth. Recycling centers make money from the materials they can sort, so you get an immediate return on investment once you get your system up and running. Ma estimates that by installing the robot on the sorting line, the shop could generate an additional $485,000 in annual revenue compared to the $160,000 initial investment and $24,000 maintenance fee. This is significantly cheaper than competitors, and Ma believes it will also make the robot more efficient.
Since these machines are already shipping, Ma’s next goal is to make the robots sturdier, smaller, and more versatile. Once it becomes sufficiently portable, it can be used outside of dedicated waste facilities, opening up a whole other world of use cases.
“Once the size is reduced, it can be used as a standalone recycling solution for events, or to recycle waste at the source in shopping centers, hospitals, and airports,” Ma told TechCrunch. “That’s how we can really change the way packaging waste is managed.”
Danu Robotics will be participating in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200, October 13-15 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
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