In an industry relatively vacant of innovation, a Denver startup stepped up during Covid-19 to introduce artificial intelligence and robotics in a time of need for the recycling field.
Now, on the back of a strong 2020, the company has closed a large funding round to scale its business to meet a growing demand.
AMP Robotics raised $55 million in corporate equity in a Series B financing, led by XN with participation from new investors Valor Equity Partners and GV as well as existing investors Sequoia Capital, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Congruent Ventures and Closed Loop Partners.
This new round of funding follows a $16 million Series A financing round led by Sequoia Capital in November 2019.
Founder and CEO Matanya Horowitz said AMP will use this funding to scale its business operations to meet the market demand for its technology and develop new AI product applications.
Like many other startups, AMP’s business slowed greatly at the start of the pandemic and the company turned its focus inward. Then, as companies in the waste industry searched for Covid-safe solutions, AMP saw an uptick in business.
“What we found was, pretty quickly, a lot of these recycling facilities started running into trouble. They are not built with things like social distancing in mind,” Horowitz said. “You saw real issues with getting enough sorting manpower in these recycling facilities. In April and May we started getting serious inquiries for much larger orders than we were seeing to that point.”
In late 2020, AMP signed a long-term agreement with Waste Connections, Inc. to deploy 24 AI-guided robotics systems, the company’s largest contract to date. To date, AMP has hundreds of deployments across more than 20 states and three continents.
AMP’s technology applies computer vision and deep learning to guide high-speed robotics systems to identify and differentiate recyclables found in the waste stream by color, size, shape, opacity, consumer brand and more. The company’s technology can recognize and recover material as small as a bottle cap from complex material streams.
The company has about 90 employees and expects to grow its staff between 50% and 70% in the next year following this round.
The new capital will also support AMP’s market expansion as it works with consumer packaged goods companies, like Keurig Dr Pepper, to help them achieve their recycled content and sustainability goals.
"AMP's technology radically improves the economics and efficiency of recycling and creates transformational long-term value for customers, the economy, and the environment," Gaurav Kapadia, founder of lead investor XN, said in a statement.
While the capital will fuel much of AMP’s growth moving forward, Horowitz said one of the biggest benefits of the round is cementing the startup’s place in the industry.
“The recycling industry doesn’t have many startups, it’s an old school industry where people have been around for a generation or generations,” he said. “Pretty reasonably, people wonder ‘are these new robot guys really going to stick around?’ With this amount of funding, I think it’s pretty clear we’re in this for the long-term.”
