Daily Newsletter

17 November 2023

Daily Newsletter

17 November 2023

Tech platform SuperCircle raises $7M in funding to tackle surging textile waste

Circular technology and logistics platform, SuperCircle has secured a $7m Pre-Series A funding round to meet the increasing demand for its textile recycling solutions for brands and retailers.

Isatou Ndure November 16 2023

The Pre-Series A financing round for SuperCircle was co-led by Radicle Impact and Ulu Ventures, with participation from Earthshot Ventures, BBG Ventures, Lyra Ventures, and Blueprint Ventures.

The recent financing will be instrumental in growing SuperCircle's infrastructure and streamlining shipping, consolidation, sorting, grading, and recycling services for brands and retailers globally.

Additionally, it will accelerate the formation of strategic partnerships, furthering brand-owned recycling programmes and bulk inventory solutions.

"We are proud to support SuperCircle's vision of building a comprehensive textile recycling platform connecting brands to recyclers to address the urgent and growing problem of 11.3M tons of textile waste going to landfills each year in the US,” said Ami Naik, a partner at Radicle Impact.

The Pre-Series A funding round aims to facilitate key strategic hires across sales, operations, technology, and engineering to enhance circularity solutions for an extensive portfolio of brands.

SuperCircle's technology and reverse logistics infrastructure was in response to the growing textile waste crisis in the US where 60% of clothing now finds its way to landfills within a year.

The platform’s plug-and-play technology integrates waste management with fibre-to-fibre recycling solutions, offering transparency for brand-owned recycling programmes and bulk inventory offloading.

The company says its technology has helped brands and retailers, including Uniqlo (US), Reformation, Parachute, A.L.C., and Tentree, to address this issue.

Chloe Songer, CEO, and co-founder of SuperCircle said: “We’ve seen such an acceleration in retail’s adoption of circularity and extended producer responsibility over the last five years and recognized the need to create a bridge between retail brands and the recycling industry today.

“SuperCircle’s end-to-end technology and logistics platforms allow brands to collect, sort, and process pre-consumer and post-consumer apparel and footwear while providing garment level tracking and tracing through responsible end-of-life.”

Since its launch in 2022, SuperCircle claims to have powered post-consumer recycling programmes for brands, resulting in the recycling of over 1 million garments.

The platform boasts of demonstrating strong returns on investment for partners through customer trade-ins, offering a scalable circular solution that aligns business goals with environmental sustainability.

Kathy Chen, a partner at Ulu Ventures, highlighted SuperCircle as the connective tissue linking consumers, retailers, logistic providers, and recyclers and added: “With tremendous buy-in from the retail industry, we now have the momentum to make circularity a reality.”

SuperCircle is a founding member of the American Circular Textiles (ACT) policy group, which launched in 2022 and aimed to align fashion’s circularity community on the development of supportive policy to address the challenges to scaling domestic textile recovery and end-of-life solutions.

Clothing and footwear ranked among the top 3 sectors by global ecommerce transactions in 2022

Per GlobalData estimates, food and drink, clothing and footwear, and accommodation were the top three sectors by global ecommerce transactions in 2022. Clothing and footwear accounted for 11% of ecommerce transactions in 2022. While consumers may wish to try on clothing and footwear items to ensure a good fit, enhanced technology that offers sizing recommendations and hassle-free returns services has made them more comfortable shopping for these goods online, accounting for the sector’s high share of transactions.

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