Molg announced the closing of $5.5 million in seed funding to scale the company’s circular manufacturing processes for electronics and electrical components. Closed Loop Partners’ Ventures Group led the funding round, which included participation from Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, ABB Robotics & Automation Ventures, Overture, Elemental Impact, and Techstars. The company plans to use the funding to scale production capacity and meet growing customer demand for circularity and automation.
This funding round is closing at a notable time, with a growing urgency to keep electronics in circulation and recover the critical minerals needed to support the clean energy transition. There are tens of millions of tons of electronic devices that are discarded or become obsolete each year.
Many critical minerals and precious metals are also left unrecovered within electronics waste, missing the opportunity for reuse and remanufacturing for clean energy supply chains. As these materials grow increasingly scarce, expensive, and geopolitically sensitive, more solutions are needed to keep them in circulation.
Molg addresses the e-waste challenge through a comprehensive circular manufacturing process powered by robotics and design. And its robotic microfactories can autonomously disassemble complex electronic products to recover valuable components for reuse, remanufacturing or recycling. Plus, the team also partners with leading manufacturers to design electronics with circularity in mind—ensuring one product’s end is another’s new beginning.
Molg has its headquarters and manufacturing facility in the heart of the data center industry in Northern Virginia. And the company’s seed round of funding will be used primarily to scale production to meet customer demand for circular supply chains.
Molg already installed robotic disassembly Microfactories at Sims Lifecycle Services and is rolling out to ITAD facilities of leading hyperscalers. And the team also works on circular design with leading companies like HP, Dell and ABB Robotics & Automation Ventures to redesign products for the automated recovery of valuable components, remanufacturing and recycling.
KEY QUOTES:
“After a decade in consumer electronics manufacturing, we founded Molg because we saw firsthand how current design, production, and recovery processes—or the absence thereof—contribute to the massive problem of e-waste. Achieving true circularity requires a fundamental shift in the underlying systems that support demanufacturing. It starts with better design and is enabled by dynamic automation. This funding allows us to accelerate our work at both ends of a product’s life, designing for circularity from the start and recovering valuable devices, components and materials through automated disassembly.”
-Molg cofounder and CEO Rob Lawson-Shanks
“We invested in Molg because they are rethinking how critical materials can be recovered from electronics, addressing a historically overlooked source of valuable resources. Their process maximizes the value of recovered materials and allows for local recovery where materials are most needed––important parts of advancing the circular economy. They are helping to unlock a scalable solution that not only reduces environmental impact but also strengthens supply chains by recovering materials domestically.”
-Aly Bryan, an investor on the Ventures Group team of Closed Loop Partners, a firm focused on building the circular economy
“Amazon remains committed to our decarbonization efforts and supporting technologies that aim to improve the circularity of our supply chains. Efforts to improve hardware demanufacturing and material recovery, such as those developed by Molg, are promising technologies that can help advance the recycling and material recovery industries at scale. We are excited to support the growth of Molg, a company at the forefront of unlocking circular supply chains for electronics.”
-Sam LaPierre, Investor at Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund
“Our investment in Molg will open new possibilities for using industrial robots in the recovery and recycling of data center equipment. By helping to enable the automated disassembly and responsible disposal of disused electronics, we are excited to be playing our role in transforming the circularity and sustainability of the data center sector.”
-ABB Robotics Managing Director Business Line Industries, Craig McDonnell
“We invested in Molg to help solve two critical challenges: dealing with mountains of toxic waste that are growing every year, and meeting the rapidly increasing demand for critical minerals in batteries, data centers, and electronics. Molg is an example of how innovation in AI and robotics can be good for the planet and consumers: why would we landfill precious metals when we can recover them domestically and reuse them?”
-Elemental Impact CEO Dawn Lippert
“The AI boom and rapid expansion of data centers is coinciding with an energy transition that demands an immense supply of critical minerals. Molg helps hyperscalers and electronics manufacturers tap into the supply of retired servers and other e-waste that still contain immense material value. Molg’s robotic solution not only moves the industry towards circularity; it presents a supply that is cheaper and more domestically secure.”
-Overture Climate VC Managing Partner, Shomik Dutta
