Five years ago, long before A and I were the only two letters in the startup alphabet, Rebecca Hu-Thrams had a glimpse of the future. Deeply compelled to contribute to the fight against climate change, she had started to research different aspects of climate technology and soon found herself utterly transfixed by trash—an area that had seen very little technological innovation despite being integral to human existence and modern life, and a significant contributor to the crisis at hand.
Following an introduction to her future co-founder Areeb Malik, a former Meta software and AI engineer who was equally enamored with trash, Rebecca found herself on a path from which there was no turning back. Someone had to build the tools to revolutionize recycling and power the circular economy—the market needed it, the planet needed it, and the technology required to enable it had just emerged. A shared mission to end waste heralded the start of a remarkable company: Glacier.
It wasn’t long before Rebecca and Areeb caught the attention of Ann Bordetsky, an NEA partner with a growing focus on AI, a longtime passion for climate tech, and experience in building category creating companies. Glacier was pioneering a novel AI and robotics system that would transform the recycling industry (an $80B+ market) with automation and intelligence, solving acute labor shortages while creating first-of-its-kind data to measure and understand what products, brands and materials move through the system. Impact happens at scale and Glacier had cracked the code for a scalable solution. Her conviction grew rapidly as she got to know the founders and their vision, prompting NEA to lead Glacier’s Seed round in 2022 and alongside Amazon’s Climate Fund in 2024. As Glacier continues to accelerate and transform the waste and materials industry, we are thrilled to participate in the Series A financing and continue to support Glacier on their mission to end waste.
Ann recently caught up with Rebecca to discuss why brands are doubling down on the circular economy, how Glacier is helping to close the gap between "recyclable" and "recycled" materials, and the surprisingly big opportunity where trash meets technology.
Ann Bordetsky: Rebecca, thank you for joining me today. Let's jump right in with a topic that has really started to gain momentum recently—the circular economy. When NEA first invested in Glacier two years ago, it still felt like a very nascent concept. But today it’s a hot topic among some of the world's largest brands, especially e-commerce giants and global producers. What has changed to really focus people's attention on extending the lifecycle of goods and materials?
Rebecca Hu-Thrams: A lot has changed, but there are two tailwinds that are especially important to our business. When we founded Glacier five years ago, brands and producers were just starting to measure the connection between consumer behavior and packaging sustainability. Today they have five-plus years of data clearly and unequivocally showing that sustainability is a huge driver of customer acquisition and loyalty. So what was initially a nice-to-have, feel-good marketing tactic is now viewed as an essential metric directly tied to a company's revenue base. Sustainable packaging has become a non-negotiable for many of the world's biggest consumer product brands.
Legislation is also accelerating the transition to a circular economy. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws didn't exist in the U.S. when Glacier was founded, but today about 20% of the U.S. population lives in a state that has passed EPR legislation, and many more states are poised to follow suit. And it will go into effect as early as July 2025 in Oregon. EPR shifts some of the burden of responsibility onto the producers making all of this packaging, to understand where it all goes and ensure that it can be recycled--it's no longer sufficient to say packaging is sustainable, they now have to measure and prove it.
A: It sounds like a perfect storm between economic incentives, regulation and consumer demand to make sustainable packaging a priority for brands, but you also mentioned it’s having a direct impact on revenue–can you expand on how this recycling data impacts companies’ topline and bottom line performance?
R: Brands now deeply understand that the amount of money a customer spends on their products is very correlated to the extent to which they can prove the sustainability of their packaging. It's no longer about making customers feel good by saying the right thing, it's about having the receipts to back it up. A company's ability to generate more sales and maintain market leadership is directly linked to their ability to prove that their packaging is as sustainable and circular as they claim it is.
A: One company that is really at the forefront of this is Amazon - their 2024 sustainability report prominently featured Glacier. What makes recycling robotics and AI important to an ecommerce powerhouse like Amazon, and how are you partnering with them?
R: Companies like Amazon have a vested interest in the circularity of all of the stuff they're putting out there. One thing a lot of people don't realize about recycling is that it is fundamentally a manufacturing exercise. For a company that is viewed as a thought leader in e-commerce and supply chain management like Amazon, investing in Glacier is essentially an investment in their own supply chain. Circularity will be an increasingly important pillar of large producers’ supply chains in the future, and a company like Glacier enables them to understand where all of their packaging is ending up in the world and develop a strategy for improving the circularity of the entire value chain.
A: Amazon tends to be a trendsetter for other companies in everything from warehouse automation to global logistics. When you think about your partnership with Amazon, what aspects of that engagement do you hope will become a trend across the industry?
R: Amazon definitely leads the industry in new directions, and some of these themes are already taking root within its peer companies today. The first I'd note is a nuanced but essential transition from "recyclable" to "recycled." Historically, there's been no way to verify if a certain piece of packaging is ultimately recycled and brought back into the circular supply chain. Companies could say that their packaging was recyclable–i.e., technically able to be recycled based on their R&D–and that's where the buck stopped. Amazon is pushing that farther, not just saying that packaging can be recycled but having the data to know at what rate it actually is being recycled and successfully recovered back into the circular supply chain.
Before Glacier, manual audits were really the only way for companies to assess package recycling rates–teams would go into recycling facilities and sort through a ton of mixed waste by hand. Obviously there are a lot of flaws with that approach, like point-in-time readouts, variations across geographies, seasonality, etc. By enabling a continuous, item-level view of where each piece of material is ending up, Glacier unlocks the ability for Amazon and other companies to actually measure true recycling rates.
Another trend is that companies are seeking to invest in their own circular manufacturing supply chains, in many cases driven by legislation around minimum recycled content, which effectively creates a floor for the demand and economic value of recycled materials. That poses a huge risk to supply chains for large consumer goods companies, because there is no guarantee they can get their hands on enough of that recycled feedstock to meet those minimum requirements. Glacier can help them understand where there are opportunities to recover more recycled cardboard, more recycled PET plastic, etc. There's also a big opportunity for those companies to reduce the waste footprint of their own internal operations with our recycling traceability tools.
A: What you're describing is truly a paradigm shift. In the past, the emphasis was always on consumer education with respect to recycling–we all grew up hearing about reduce, reuse, recycle. But now the onus is shifting from consumers to the producers of those materials. Companies, rather than end-users, are increasingly accountable for the goods and materials they put into the waste stream.
R: Exactly, and it's thrilling to be on the front lines of this shift with Glacier's enabling technology. A decade ago, even if these laws had passed, there was really no way to enforce or audit or even help companies accurately assess what happened to the waste resulting from their products and operations.
A: One thing I’ve noticed working together is that very few people in tech are experts in circularity or materials recycling. You guys are!. So let’s do some myth busters, highlighting some of the biggest misconceptions about the recycling industry. I’ll start with one of my favorites: Recycling is a small market.
R: Recycling is the biggest industry you never think about. There are about 1,300 recycling facilities across the U.S. alone and a huge opportunity to bring automation into each of them. We estimate that Glacier is addressing an $80B+ market across the automation and data insights solutions we’re building. Here’s another myth: The recycling industry is slow to adopt new innovation.
It’s true that when you’re building a $50M recycling facility once every 20 years or so, you are going to be very diligent in vetting the technology and equipment that goes into it. But the industry is embracing Glacier’s with open arms—not just because they’re excited to try out the cutting-edge AI and robots, but because they care about running profitable businesses - so they urgently need to find ways to improve the quality of their material, the quantity they’re recovering, and the stability of their throughput. That is a value proposition Glacier delivers on over and over again, with payback periods as short as twelve months.
A: What about this one: Robots are very capital-intensive and difficult to scale.
R: In less than four years, Glacier has designed, built and fully commercialized a purpose-built industrial robot that is now being used by dozens of customers across the country. Our lead time is just a few months, we install in one weekend with no downtime, and we deliver best-in-class performance and uptime while costing less than half of other automation solutions on the market.
A: Okay, final myth: You can’t build a $1 billion+ technology company in recycling.
R: The path to building a billion-dollar business in recycling is shockingly straightforward. If we achieved just under 2% penetration in our addressable market, we would already be at $1B in revenue. When you think about the waste being produced across our entire planet and re-envision that waste not as trash but as value that can be captured, then the size of the opportunity becomes immediately clear. Our goal is for Glacier to become the fundamental technology layer that enables all of that value to be captured.
R: Ann, I have a question for you. You were a very early believer in Glacier when you led our seed round, and NEA has doubled down since then. What gave you the conviction to invest in us?
A: When you look at the history of technology companies, the most valuable businesses over time tend to be category creators. These companies typically emerge from a unique confluence of new technologies, policy or regulatory changes, shifts in culture and some business model innovation. It takes the right team to recognize that ‘perfect storm’ and seize the opportunity at the right time to build a category-defining company. That’s exactly what I saw in Glacier early on. You had a fresh perspective on the industry. You saw the customer’s need and had the technical insights on how to design the solution. You also saw the big picture of how recyclers, producers and brands are all part of the same supply chain and needed a business intelligence layer to inform manufacturing decisions and understand materials movement. As founders, you and Areeb were also obsessed with trash and recycling and I knew you would find your way to building a generational company in this space.
A: You were also well ahead of the curve—you started building an AI company years before LLMS and generative AI took off and brought AI into the mainstream. Why is AI a fundamental part of Glacier’s technology platform and how do the latest advancements in AI accelerate your roadmap?
R: Recycling traceability, or materials observability as it’s also called, is actually a perfect use for AI. We’re installing vision systems into recycling facilities to identify all the different types of materials passing through—it’s a highly heterogeneous and rapidly evolving data stream, also known as all of the stuff that we’re throwing away. Indexing this data stream requires technology that can ingest a huge amount of disparate data in real time and adapt quickly to changes and outliers, from new types of packaging to really weird edge cases like surfboards and hand grenades.
With increasing granularity and an increasingly powerful AI architecture, we can now start identifying materials beyond basic categories like ‘aluminum can’ or ‘cardboard box’—we can actually detect brands, so we can tell you if something is a Coca-Cola bottle or a Colgate toothpaste tube. This new type of metadata unlocks a huge amount of value for brands and producers that are trying to understand consumption and disposal patterns related to their own packaging.
We believe ‘physical AI’ has significant competitive advantages. Glacier is getting information on a physical data set that no one else can see or visualize; our hardware is a powerful moat that we can deploy quickly and cost-effectively. We see this as the next frontier of where AI will deliver value—by integrating it into the physical world.
A: For investors, oftentimes seeing is believing. We get pitched a lot of different ideas, but seeing a technology solution in action can be profound. I remember having that “aha” moment with Glacier when we visited a recycling plant in the Bay Area, mid-pandemic no less. It isn’t until you are standing in a recycling plant that you appreciate how complex, dirty and dangerous the job is. Seeing the Glacier robotics system in action is very eye-opening. I remember thinking, wow, this is inevitable. This has to exist. This is the way.
R: It’s so true! Many people have never even stopped to consider where all of the stuff they’re throwing out actually ends up, much less the ways that process could be improved. Actually seeing the sights and sounds and many, many smells of these recycling facilities makes it very real.
Ten years from now, I hope we’re living in a world where everyone has that level of awareness—where every box, every bottle, every can that is thrown out can be detected and recovered using our technology. That’s our vision for Glacier—to accelerate the transition to circular manufacturing and be the go-to solution that can recover any type of material and be the source of record for any type of information about the supply chain. That includes recyclers and waste companies, producers, brands, legislators, consumers and any other stakeholders across the circular manufacturing value chain. There is a growing appetite to understand where all of the stuff we consume and discard ends up, and we are really excited to be building a company that can benefit literally everyone on this planet.
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