Textile and plastic waste are a major problem, but to recycle waste effectively it needs to be identified and sorted rapidly by material composition. Matoha has created affordable, AI-powered spectroscopic material scanners that can identify the polymer composition of textiles, carpets and plastics waste in under 0.5 second. Their customers have already used their solutions to divert tens of thousands of tonnes of textiles waste from the landfill to recycling and resale. This could also reduce the emissions that would have resulted from the decomposition or incineration of that waste and the environmental and resource cost from not using more virgin materials for new clothing.
Dr Hans Chan is the CTO and one of the Co-founders of Matoha, with responsibilities for solution and technology development, customer engagement and overseeing sales strategy and the sales activation plan. He observes that: “My cofounder and I are both technical founders; while we have successfully grown the company organically over the last eight years, we don't always get things right. The Shott Scale Up Accelerator can give us the training we need to run an ever-growing company that has only secured its seed round 6 months ago.”
Dr Chan recognises that this phase of Matoha’s growth requires a mixture of support and training to help him develop in this role. The mentoring and coaching, training workshops and networking opportunities in the Shott Scale Up Accelerator provide many opportunities to support develop his changing role.
Matoha have exported more than 700 of material identification scanners to over 300 unique customers in 60 countries. As they now scale up they are looking to offer a Hardware-as-a-Service business model, with cloud-reporting and data-driven services; a commercial release of SmartBench, their latest innovation in semi-automated solutions for secondhand clothing grading, sorting and resale; and a demonstrator robotic cell for automated textile waste sorting for recycling.
