A London startup that teaches cameras to recognize garbage has hit a threshold its founders say validates the role of artificial intelligence in the recycling business.
Greyparrot announced Tuesday it raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by technology investor Omar Mir. The company disclosed the round on July 28, alongside a different kind of milestone: its vision systems had logged more than 1 trillion detections of waste objects since deployment began, identifying items by material type, brand, and recyclability as they tumble past on sorting belts.
The company declined to name other investors in the round or discuss valuation. Greyparrot has now raised $60 million in total funding, including grants. That figure includes an $11 million Series A in May 2022 led by climate investor Una Terra and a $12.8 million strategic investment from Bollegraaf, the world's largest recycling-plant builder, announced on February 7, 2024.
It's an unusual trajectory for a waste-tech company. Greyparrot emerged from the ashes of Blippar, an augmented-reality startup that collapsed in 2018 after burning through more than $150 million. CEO Mikela Druckman, who was Blippar's chief commercial officer, co-founded Greyparrot in 2019 with Blippar co-founder Ambarish Mitra and engineer Nikola Sivacki. The pivot from consumer AR to industrial waste recognition reflected a pragmatic calculation: municipalities and material recovery facilities had money to spend, and regulatory pressure was mounting.
The core product is a suite of edge-AI cameras Greyparrot calls Analyzers. The units mount above conveyor belts at recycling plants and identify objects in real time. That data flows into an analytics platform called Deepnest, which recyclers use to track contamination and throughput while consumer-goods companies use it to validate whether their packaging actually gets sorted as intended.
Greyparrot says it has deployed more than 300 Analyzer units across 86 facilities in over 20 countries. The company claims 70 percent market share in Europe's waste sector by its own internal methodology, though it declined to detail how that figure is calculated. In 2025, the company logged 477 billion detections across 52 billion waste objects.
The new funding will support expansion in North America and Europe, Greyparrot said, as well as hiring for AI, data science, and product teams. The startup currently employs 55 people. It aims to help divert more than 1 million tonnes of waste from landfills by 2030, though the path to that goal remains somewhat abstract—Greyparrot's cameras don't physically sort waste, they simply observe and report.
The customer roster includes major waste haulers such as Waste Management, Veolia, Biffa, and FCC. On the brand side, Unilever, L'Oréal, and Kenvue use Deepnest to test packaging designs against real-world sorting data. In September, Circular Services—an operating company of impact investor Closed Loop Partners—deployed Greyparrot's system at its facility in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood to track aluminum recovery, according to Waste Dive.
Regulatory developments have added urgency. In the first quarter of this year, the UK Environment Agency accepted AI-derived waste composition data from Greyparrot for statutory compliance reporting, with Biffa and FCC submitting the data. Greyparrot says it was the first regulatory acceptance of AI waste intelligence for compliance purposes, a distinction that matters as extended producer responsibility laws proliferate.
Seven U.S. states have enacted packaging EPR laws, according to trackers maintained by the American Bar Association and the EPR Atlas. Those laws require brands to report packaging data and pay fees tied to material recovery rates. The mandates create demand for the audit trail that Greyparrot and its competitors provide, though enforcing the rules has proved uneven.
Competition in the sector is intensifying. AMP Robotics pairs AI vision with robotic arms that physically pick items off belts. Recycleye, a UK rival, raised $17 million in January 2023. EverestLabs launched what it calls an "agentic AI" platform called Navigator in September for facility operations. Traditional equipment makers TOMRA and Machinex have retrofitted their optical sorters with AI modules. Bollegraaf now distributes Greyparrot's Analyzer globally under the 2024 partnership, which also transferred Bollegraaf's AI vision intellectual property and team to Greyparrot.
The deal with Bollegraaf was strategic. It gave Greyparrot access to a global equipment distribution network while consolidating Bollegraaf's own AI development efforts under one roof. For Bollegraaf, it offered a way to add a software revenue stream without building the capability in-house.
"Waste is one of the planet's largest untapped resources, and data is the infrastructure that unlocks it," Druckman said in the company's announcement. Mitra framed the opportunity more expansively, writing that "waste intelligence will do for materials what satellite data did for navigation."
David Lickstein, global head of packaging innovation at Kenvue, which uses Deepnest to test packaging designs, put it more plainly. "We must move beyond aspirational guidelines and embrace real-world evidence" to meet circular packaging goals, he said.
Greyparrot launched a live overall equipment effectiveness tracking feature for recovery facilities on September 16, the company said. It continues to add Analyzer deployments with Bollegraaf handling distribution. The company also participated in Amazon's 2025 Sustainability Accelerator cohort and received backing from Tony Fadell's Build Collective in September 2024 for next-generation Analyzer hardware.
Whether a trillion detections translates into measurably cleaner recycling streams or just better dashboards remains an open question. But in a sector starved for data and facing tightening regulation, Greyparrot's cameras have found a niche.
