Smartbin.io Founder Hamoun Karami on Building Smarter Waste Management

At smartbin.io, we are building an autonomous waste and recycling system for commercial buildings in North America. The solution includes a trash-bin-collecting robot, smart waste and recycling bins, and a recycling sorting machine. We help our customers lower their operating expenses and achieve 95% or more waste diversion rates.

I have always been highly interested in and motivated by solving large, complex problems. The way waste and recycling is managed today is still much like the way it was done 50 years ago. After discovering this, I made a promise to myself that I would not stop until I made a positive dent in the industry.

Believe it or not, Alexander Lehnert and I first met on Discord. We had a common interest in waste and recycling, and Alexander’s design skills were second to none. Alexander brings the design pillar to our core team’s skill set, one we believe will prove to be critical to our success. Alexander has worked on multimillion-dollar design projects with some of the largest brands in the world, including Mercedes, BMW, and Lufthansa.

Andrea Bulgarelli and I also met online. Andrea is a Techstars alum. He first attended the program in 2015. After smartbin.io joined Techstars in 2021, Andrea became our mentor. Andrea decided to join our company full-time as the new CTO in December 2021. He has taken product concepts from napkin to production several times in his career. In his last startup as CTO, Andrea shipped more than 12,000 robots globally and gained international recognition in 2019, with his product receiving Time magazine’s Best Inventions Award and the Red Dot Design Award.

The janitorial services industry is experiencing the largest labor shortage in history. The costs to manage waste and recycling in a building are high, and waste contamination continues to cripple the supply chain, rendering all our plastic waste unusable. Through the use of smart waste and recycling bins, an autonomous trash-bin-collecting robot and a recycling sorting machine, smartbin.io helps commercial buildings take in waste and recycling and output pre-sorted, high-quality recyclables that can be sold to the commodities market.

Our target customers are commercial property managers in North America. Specifically, we do product demonstrations for operations and sustainability employees at these companies. Since our product offers both a financial incentive and an environmental one, we are able to scale our impact linearly.

Our system significantly reduces the pains and challenges associated with high contamination rates and alleviates the single point of failure in our broken recycling systems of today. Since the cost to manage our waste and recycling is so high, the recyclables that are baled and sold to the commodities markets reflect this cost. This ultimately deems recycled materials more expensive than raw, high-quality materials.

We significantly reduce the cost to manage waste and recycling by bringing the technologies to weigh and sort these materials. The cost of our collected recycled materials becomes more competitive, and this inherently promotes a more sustainable and circular economy.

A lot of companies are using computer vision and sorting mechanics on every smart bin that they produce. Although the technology is exciting, the smart bins cost thousands of dollars, must be plugged into a wall, and come with a flatscreen TV (not kidding). Solving recycling contamination is the most important aspect of anyone working in our industry. However, without clear financial incentives built into the solution, these types of products simply do not scale.

Unlike our competitors, we use simple low-tech sensors to only detect fill levels of our waste and recycling. Once the bins become full, they send an alert to our robot, which comes and collects it. The robot captures the weight of the waste and takes the waste to be processed in our back-of-house sorting machine. Instead of sorting waste and recycling at every smart bin, our sorting machine uses computer vision and robotic arms to sort the waste fed into its conveyor. This allows our customers to achieve 95% or more waste diversion scores and pay less for waste and recycling collection.

We are using the funds from this round to build our trash-bin-collecting robot prototype. Once the prototype is ready, we plan to conduct two to three pilots at different locations to calibrate and improve our design. Within the next eight to 12 months, we will begin our seed raise to take our design commercial.

There are not a lot of people in this world who know about commercial building waste and recycling as well as our team at smartbin.io. With the advancement of computer vision and robotics technology, we are confident that we are the team to execute this vision. We love investors who get involved. If there is someone in your network who you think we should connect or partner with, please let us know.

Our team is dedicated to seeing this company go all the way. If we are offered a merger and acquisition opportunity with a company that we respect and see as a great partner, we would welcome the opportunity.