A UK startup has developed artificial intelligence (AI) powered material identification scanners to work towards sorting textiles for recycling.

London-based Matoha, which has recently completed its first phase of a £1.5m seed funding round, has turned its idea for easy-to-use, affordable material scanners into a commercial product.

The initial idea to create supermarket-checkout style scanners for plastic, evolved as founders Martin Holicky and Hans Chan realised an “urgent” demand for material identification in textiles. They have now developed manually operated devices that scan, which identify the make-up of textiles in less than a second, enabling businesses to sort waste efficiently “without a huge investment in infrastructure”.

Chris Newton, chief commercial officer at Matoha, told WTiN: “At its core, our technology uses near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. That means we shine infrared light on a material and look at how it reflects. That tells us what the material is