Amp receives investment led by Congruent Ventures

Amp, a Denver-based provider of artificial intelligence-, or AI-, powered sorting for the waste and recycling industry, has raised $91 million in corporate equity in a Series D financing led by San Francisco-based Congruent Ventures. The 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 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," Amp CEO Tim Stuart says. "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.”

Amp plans to use this funding to accelerate deployment of its Amp One systems, which can sort municipal solid waste (MSW). The company has installed and operates the first-of-its-kind system in Portsmouth, Virginia. Last month, AMP also entered into an agreement with Waste Connections Inc. to equip and operate one of that company’s single-stream material recovery facilities (MRFs) in Colorado.

Amp One provides a full-scale facility solution to sort various material streams, including single-stream, secondary and dirty MRFs.

Since its founding, Amp has introduced a variety of AI-enabled technology, from the Cortex-C, a compact version of its robotics system, to Vortex, which targets and recovers film and flexible packaging. These solutions often were designed to be retrofitted into facilities. However, the company’s new Amp One consists of a set of different tools the company can apply to greenfield projects rather than retrofits, providing “a high certainty that recovery rates are optimized,” Amp's Matanya Horowitz told Recycling Today earlier this year when it announced its rebranding and the introduction of Amp One.

“Recycling rates have stagnated in the United States, despite the positive benefits recycling offers local economies and the environment,” says Horowitz, founder of Amp and the company’s chief technology officer. “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.” 

Amp's AI uses deep learning to continuously train itself by processing millions of material images into data. The software uses pattern recognition of colors, textures, shapes, sizes and logos to identify recyclables and contaminants in real-time, enabling new offtake chemistries and capabilities.

“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," Congruent Ventures co-founder and managing partner Abe Yokell says. "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.”