Funding
And, the company – London-based TrueCircle – announced this week that it had raised US$5.5 million from the US Climate Tech venture capital investor, Lowercarbon Capital.
Truecircle’s chief executive, Rishi Stocker explained that its mission is to “empower facilities with AI to operate more efficiently and profitably”.
TrueCircle has already deployed its AI vision systems into nine large MRFs in Europe, including for companies such as Viridor. The equipment is described as “straight-forward and lightweight”, and with a camera uses AI to scan material on the belts and report back.
Vision
The company said that its vision systems can go over plastic and fibre output lines in order to perform automated composition analysis by weight in real time on 100% of the output material flow. It claimed: “TrueCircle’s vision systems achieve accuracy rates of >95% and can distinguish waste items to an extremely granular level of detail, such as a non food grade HDPE coloured bottle with size 750ml and weight 65g.”
Facility operators with the vision system access a TrueCircle Dashboard to track their output lines’ quality and can set up automated alerts to notify them as soon as quality dips below a certain level.
“This alert provides a detailed breakdown of the specific contaminants and allows operators to take corrective action as soon as possible, directly improving their overall quality and profitability,” said TrueCircle.
Lithium batteries
Another dedicated engineering team at TrueCircle, the company explained, has been focused on developing what it considers is the industry’s first AI powered, multi-sensor scanner that detects high fire risk lithium polymer batteries in thick piles of material on MRF infeed conveyor lines.
Engineering
TrueCircle said that is core engineering team is “now 20 people strong”. Past work has involved working on AI products at scale in other industries with companies such as Amazon, Ocado, Onfido and Revolut. It said that is motivation for building TrueCircle was “to ensure that the recycling industry could benefit from the latest advancements in AI.”
[updated 9 March 2022]
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