SuperCircle closes preseries A funding round

Circular technology and logistics platform SuperCircle, New York, has raised $7 million in its preseries A financing round to scale and meet the demand for its textile recycling solutions for brands and retailers. The round was co-led by San Francisco-based Radicle Impact and Palo Alto, California-based Ulu Ventures, with additional investors that included San Francisco-based firms Earthshot Ventures and Blueprint Ventures, New York-based BBG Ventures and Singapore-based Lyra Ventures.

SuperCircle says textile waste has outpaced the growth of plastic waste in the United States over the past two decades, with 60 percent of clothing now ending up in landfills within a year. The company claims it has built the technology and reverse logistics infrastructure to power recycling solutions for brands and retailers, including Reformation, Parachute, A.L.C., Tentree and Uniqlo (U.S.), to name a few. It connects waste management with fiber-to-fiber recycling solutions, packaged in plug-and-play technology that allows brands and retailers to easily prop up brand-owned recycling programs or offload bulk inventory with a high level of transparency.

The company says the financing will allow it to expand its infrastructure, linking previously fragmented shipping, consolidation, sorting, grading and recycling services to service brands and retailers both domestically and internationally. It also will accelerate brand partnerships across brand-owned recycling programs and bulk inventory solutions. Lastly, the preseries A round will enable key, strategic growth hires across sales, operations, technology and engineering to stand up circularity solutions for as many brands as possible.

“We’ve seen such an acceleration in retail’s adoption of circularity and extended producer responsibility over the last five years and recognized the need to create a bridge between retail brands and the recycling industry today,” says Chloe Songer, CEO and co-founder of SuperCircle. “SuperCircle’s end-to-end technology and logistics platforms allows brands to collect, sort, and process pre-consumer and post-consumer apparel and footwear, while providing garment level tracking and tracing through responsible end-of-life. This is a first of its kind technology that both enables fiber-to-fiber recycling and provides real time impact metrics to our partners.”

Since its launch in 2022, SuperCircle has powered postconsumer recycling programs for brands and recycled over 1 million garments. The company claims partners on its platform have seen strong returns on investment through customer trade-in, providing a scalable circular solution that aligns their business and environmental goals.

"We are proud to support SuperCircle's vision of building a comprehensive textile recycling platform connecting brands to recyclers to address the urgent and growing problem of 11.3 million tons of textile waste going to landfills each year in the U.S.,” Radicle Impact Partner Ami Naik says. “As consumers become increasingly aware that the current system of textile recycling is broken, SuperCircle enables brands to become a critical part of the solution. Through SuperCircle, brands can easily launch sustainable brand-owned recycling programs, bolstering customer retention and loyalty while ensuring the highest-quality end use for textile waste."

SuperCircle says it has dozens of brand partnerships slated to launch in 2024.