Although Circular.eco is a relatively young Buffalo startup, its founding was a decade in the making.
The Buffalo-based tech company builds tools to promote and educate alternative approaches to recycling hard-to-recycle items. It recently got a $100,000 investment from the UB Cultivator.
The Cultivator is an early stage startup program at the University at Buffalo that can lead to pre-seed funding for participating companies.
“We learned a lot,” said Brad London, co-founder and CEO of Circular.eco. “The recycling industry, there’s a lot of opportunities for improvement, so that was one of our biggest challenges at the start: What do we go after? We built the technology to be able to meet a lot of needs.”
The startup, which officially formed in November, had been building its platform for a couple of years. The business team started Mail Back Solutions a decade ago but back then the idea wasn’t honed to a more specific focus and it was a side project.
Now, London and his wife Suzie, a co-founder, are focused on Circular.eco full time. The team also has a third co-founder, Charlie Porter, who works full-time for GreenSheen Paint.
The team is working remotely and expects to move into the Culviator space downtown at the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.
Circular.eco has been doing testing with GreenSheen Paint and municipalities in New York state, Colordo and Washington state. Over the last 90 days of testing, the startup has had over 10,000 people sign up as registered users.
The platform, which helps connect people with recyclers who want their hard-to-recycle materials, is running two recycling events with GreenSheen and Erie County over the next few months.
The $100,000 investment will go toward testing and launching, hiring contractors for the buildout and marketing.
Circular.eco expects to do a commercial product launch this fall.
“People tell you what to put in the recycling bin, but there’s not great information about what to do with the stuff you can’t,” London said.
Circular.eco is the sixth local company to acknowledge a private, growth-oriented round of funding this year. The list includes TeleSafety ($230,000), SelectFI ($750,000), Top Seedz ($750,000), CleanFiber ($28 million), Edenesque ($175,000) and Circular.eco ($100,000).
