SEATTLE – US textile recycling technology business, Evrnu, has closed a US$9m round of Series A funding. The company recently debuted its first commercially available recycling technology, NuCycl, which converts old cotton garments into high-quality materials. The round was led by Radicle Impact which has joined the Evrnu board. Additional new investors include Twynam Investments Pty Ltd, Plum Alley Investments, The Mills Fabrica Fund and Giant Leap Fund. They join existing investors CYCLEffect Regenerative Ventures, Future Tech Lab, and Magic Hour. Levi Strauss and Stella McCartney are among four global brands which intend to launch lines using Evrnu’s technology in the coming months.
To-date Evrnu has raised approximately US$11.7m. The company said it will use the financing to expand its team, begin scaling through a licensing model by 2020 and ensure product development is translated to production efficiently.
The process for NuCycl begins with discarded clothing being diverted from landfill and sorted. Garments are disassembled, shredded, and broken down to the molecular level. The raw materials are engineered into a new fibre profile, which is then spun into yarn by selected mills.
Evrnu co-founder and CEO Stacy Flynn said: “Christo, my business partner, and I built Evrnu to solve a major problem in the textile and apparel industry – waste. Evrnu technologies are designed to extract maximum value from post-consumer textile waste, allowing supply chain partners to create premium textiles made from recycled materials with no loss in performance and quality.”
Said Christopher Stanev, co-founder and president, Evrnu: “Our vision is to create garments that can easily come back into the system to be broken down again and again. Through work with our brand partners we have found ways to continually improve product performance and deliver better quality with greater value in better ways. We have a pipeline of technologies that we will continue to bring to market, all of which will reduce the fashion industry’s impact on natural resources,”
Through research and development, Evrnu labs invent technologies and license them to producers who supply to the global fashion industry. This enables the apparel industry to modernize by cost-effectively leveraging the existing infrastructure.
“We support Evrnu’s work to radically transform the apparel and textile industry by developing first-ofits kind recycled and regenerated fabric that not only produces high-quality apparel products but a range of environmental benefits. Evrnu allows the world to extend the life of precious resources of cotton and polyester, as well as the amount of textile waste sent to landfills every year,” said Kat Taylor, co-founder of Radicle Impact.
