SuperCircle secures 24 million US dollars to scale textile waste management

Circularity infrastructure start-up SuperCircle, which offers a full-service technology and reverse logistics textile management platform for retail brands, including J.Crew, Guess, and Reformation, has raised 24 million US dollars to scale its AI-powered platform.

The Series A funding was led by venture capital firm Foundry, with participation from BBG Ventures, Renewal Funds, and Elemental Impact. The capital will be used to accelerate the first full-stack, AI-powered platform enabling profitable, compliant, and traceable textile disposition across retail supply chains.

SuperCircle’s innovative platform enables global brands to transform waste from a financial liability into a profit-generating asset. It enables brands and retailers to tackle the nearly 163 billion US dollars of unsold inventory that is discarded each year globally in the US, according to research from Avery Dennison, which leads to retailers absorbing significant losses across returns, processing costs, damaged goods, and unsellable stock. In addition, research from the United States Environmental Protection Agency adds that more than 85 percent of textiles end up in landfills or incinerators.

SuperCircle provides the operating system retailers need to capture value from this would-be waste, through resale, donation, and recycling, while complying with new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations holding brands accountable for end-of-life processing. It powers post-consumer and post-industrial end-of-life optimisation for more than 75 partners, offering both front-end solutions enabling consumers to trade in old textiles, as well as back-end offerings collecting fabric scraps, excess inventory, damages, and returns.

SuperCircle secures investment to expand AI-driven textile recycling and supply-chain solutions

In a statement, SuperCircle said that the Series A funding will accelerate its technology development, expand supply chain integrations, grow its processing and reverse logistics footprint, advance data architecture for seamless compliance reporting, and support rapid onboarding of enterprise retailers.

Chloe Songer, chief executive and co-founder of SuperCircle, said: "In my early career inside major retail supply chains, I saw firsthand how much product was written off or discarded annually, garnering only pennies on the dollar because there were no better, viable end-of-life pathways.

"We built SuperCircle to give retailers a scalable, financially sound system for end-of-life, enabling value generation from textiles long after purchase via consumer trade-in, and drastically reducing supply chain losses on excess, damages, and returns, capturing maximum value from every T-shirt, sneaker, sheet set, and handbag produced."

How does SuperCircle work?

As retailers navigate tightening margins and rising operational costs, SuperCircle delivers the digital infrastructure needed to reduce waste-related losses, ensuring every textile produced delivers maximum value.

The company's AI-powered proprietary sort engine determines the most profitable and sustainable next life for every item, capturing and then, traceably and responsibly routing damaged and low-value returns, excess and obsolete inventory, production scraps, and post-consumer trade-in garments across the continental US and Canada.

SuperCircle’s technology harnesses more than 50 garment-level data points to create a digital twin of each textile, building a rapidly compounding dataset that continually strengthens its sortation engine. This intelligence drives “measurable cost savings, reduces waste handling and write-downs, and unlocks incremental revenue streams”. Brands are provided with the data and digital infrastructure required to operate in the next era of retail, where every produced asset's utility and value must be maximized long past production.

To date, SuperCircle has diverted more than 6 million textiles from landfill and aims to profitably and responsibly divert 1 billion plus textiles by 2030.

Jaclyn Hester, partner at Foundry, said: "SuperCircle is giving retailers unprecedented visibility and control at end-of-life, an area historically dominated by opaque, low-value liquidation.

"Their platform is the new industry standard for waste management infrastructure, delivering regulatory readiness, measurable impact, and profitable financial outcomes."

Commenting on the use of the platform, Kathleen Talbot, chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations at Reformation, added: "SuperCircle is our inaugural recycling partner - they’ve unlocked the first plug-and-play solution to recapture and recycle products across multiple categories.

“This is a critical step forward for fashion brands like us, and has the potential to help cement a circular, shared future."