Greyparrot, a waste-intelligence startup, has raised £20 million in Series B funding led by Omar Mir. Founded in 2019, Greyparrot builds AI camera systems that sit above sorting belts in recovery facilities, identifying the material, product and brand of every object passing through in real time. The funding will support expansion and the development of tools for turning waste into recoverable value.
For decades the waste sector has run a $2 trillion industry on manual sampling that covers less than 0.1% of the material passing through it, leaving recovery decisions, packaging redesign and policy resting on very little data. Greyparrot's systems now operate in recovery facilities across more than 20 countries, and its AI has passed one trillion waste detections. Recycling leaders including Circular Services, Murphy Road Recycling, Veolia, Biffa and SUEZ use it to improve recovery and run more profitable plants, with facilities seeing 10–30% efficiency gains and a single site saving more than $2M in a single year.
The same intelligence reaches further up the value chain. Consumer goods companies including Unilever, L'Oréal and Kenvue use Greyparrot's Deepnest platform to understand how their packaging performs after disposal and redesign it with real evidence, while policymakers are beginning to use the same data to shape initiatives such as Extended Producer Responsibility and compliance reporting.Regulation is turning measurement from a competitive edge into a requirement. Extended Producer Responsibility is now live across much of the world, and the EU's PPWR is raising the bar further, making accurate reporting on material at scale an obligation for producers and operators alike.
Investment will support expansion across North America and Europe, hire across AI, data science and product teams, and scale its technology to help recover more than one million tonnes of waste by 2030.
We're a trillion detections in, and I believe we're only now getting to the interesting part, the point where a circular economy stops being something we aspire to achieve and becomes something we can measure, build on and hold ourselves to.
Waste intelligence will do for materials what satellite data did for navigation. For decades, waste has been a blind spot. Nations compete for resources while burying and burning existing resources. What's been missing is the ability to measure what they’re losing. Once you can measure a material, you can trade it and invest in it. That is when the circular economy stops being an ambition and becomes infrastructure,
