AMP Robotics, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics for the waste industry, has raised $55 million. AMP will use this funding to scale its business operations to meet the market demand for its technology and develop innovative new AI product applications that integrate into materials recovery facilities to increase recycling rates for its customers.
Globally, more than $200 billion worth of recyclable materials goes unrecovered annually. The economics and efficiency of identifying and sorting paper, plastics, metals, and other recyclables from the waste stream creates a major challenge for material recovery. In recent years, the waste industry has also faced stricter international quality standards for contamination-free imports of recycled materials, leaving the industry in search of cost-effective alternatives to meet these requirements.
COVID-19 then forced many businesses to suspend recycling operations due to concerns for worker safety. Simultaneously, the pandemic increased demand for high-quality recycled feedstock to overcome supply chain interruptions and shifts in raw material availability.
Waste
AMP Robotics’ technology is helping the waste industry meet these challenges by modernizing recycling—improving material quality, ensuring worker safety, increasing productivity, lowering costs, diverting waste from landfill, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions—while increasing overall rates of recycling and resource recovery.
AMP’s proprietary technology applies computer vision and deep learning to guide high-speed robotics systems to precisely identify and differentiate recyclables found in the waste stream by color, size, shape, opacity, consumer brand, and more, storing data about each item it perceives. The company’s technology can recognize and recover material as small as a bottlecap and as unique as a Keurig coffee pod from complex material streams so that these materials may serve another productive life in the economy.
