AMP Robotics, a leading provider of AI-powered sortation at scale for the waste and recycling industry, announced it had raised $91 million in corporate equity in a Series D funding round led by Congruent Ventures. This funding round featured participation from current and new investors, including Sequoia Capital, XN, Blue Earth Capital, Liberty Mutual Investments, California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), Wellington Management, Range Ventures, and Tao Capital Partners.
AMP will use this latest funding round to accelerate the deployment of its AMP ONE systems. These systems are capable of cost-effectively sorting municipal solid waste (MSW), as shown by the first-of-its-kind system AMP operates in Portsmouth, Virginia.
Last month, AMP also agreed with Waste Connections to equip and operate one of Waste Connections’ single-stream recycling facilities in Colorado. AMP ONE provides a full-scale facility solution to sort various material streams and capture more of the billions of dollars in value otherwise lost to landfills or incinerated annually.
AMP’s AI uses deep learning to continuously train itself by processing millions of material images into data. The software also recognizes patterns of colors, textures, shapes, sizes, and logos to identify recyclables and contaminants in real time, enabling new offtake chemistries and capabilities.
AMP’s first products were a series of sorting robots launched with minimal retrofit into existing recycling facilities. And the company pioneered a series of next-generation, transformative recycling facilities. Through near-zero manual sorting, unprecedented reliability, and pervasive data, these facilities make the recovery of commodities safer and more cost-effective than ever and have grown to encompass MSW sorting, an offering out of reach to the industry prior to the advent of AMP’s technology.
KEY QUOTES:
“Recycling rates have stagnated in the United States despite the positive benefits recycling offers local economies and the environment. This latest investment enables us to tackle larger projects and deliver real outcomes for waste companies and municipalities – by lowering sortation costs, capturing more material value, diverting organic waste, and extending landfill life – all while helping the industry optimize its strategic assets.”
– Matanya Horowitz, founder of AMP
“AMP’s AI sortation systems enable consumers to recycle both with and without curbside separation and communities to benefit from the recovery of recycled commodities while reducing dependence on landfills. AMP is an example of the real-world impacts of AI; solutions like AMP’s will divert billions of tons of recyclable material from landfills while reducing emissions.”
– Abe Yokell, co-founder and managing partner of Congruent Ventures
“AMP provides meaningfully lower-cost, higher-performance systems to recover commodities and increase landfill diversion, and we’re uniquely positioned to reshape the waste and recycling landscape at a critical time. We’re grateful to our longstanding and newest investors for their support in helping us chart a new path for sustainable materials management and resource efficiency.”
– Tim Stuart, chief executive officer for AMP
