Evrnu Selected For Accelerator, Evrythng Snags $ 10M
● Circular fashion innovations like Evrnu fibers and Evrythng digital identities have secured new funding to advance their missions.
October is already proving to be a boon for the industry’s circular start-ups.
On Monday, textile innovation firm Evrnu secured placement in Elemental Excelerator’s ninth cohort, as part of 19 companies that will have access to more than $7 million in funding to aid in projects the accelerator says “are designed to scale 10x within two years.”
Last October, Evrnu, which was cofounded by Fashion Institute of Technology alum Stacy Flynn, snagged $9 million in Series A funding, to help expand the team and improve efficiency in product development and scalability. The Seattle-based company known for its innovative NuCycl technology — which uses repoly-merization to convert discarded clothing fibers into new, renewable performance fibers — has worked with Adidas, Stella McCartney, Levi’s and Target.
“We are honored to be selected from nearly 800 applicants from 54 countries and look forward to working with the Elemental team to scale and deploy our NuCycl technology,” Flynn said. “Together, our work will tackle pressing environmental issues, drive innovation in local and global markets, and improve equitable access to technology.”
The Elemental Excelerator, a Honolulubased nonprofit, aims to advance and scale solutions to climate change. Each year, it identifies 15 to 20 companies that best fit its mission and funds each one with up to $1 million to improve systems that impact people’s lives across areas like energy, agriculture and the circular economy.
Pushing for greater representation in its portfolio, half of the companies of cohort 9 have a female founder, and nearly half have a founder who identifies as a person of color. A third of the companies have founders who identify as Black or Indigenous.
In a separate announcement tied to advancing circularity, Evrythng secured
$10 million to advance its global growth, the size of its team and its product capabilities on traceability and machinelearning technology. The platform can help companies make more data-driven decisions, and real-time visibility across the supply chain will be key in helping them deliver on circularity goals. The funding is led by Copenhagen-based IDC Ventures and private investor and Evrythng chairman Simon Eyers, among others.
The Evrythng platform, which leverages Internet of Things technology to create fully traceable digital product identities that correspond with physical products, works with brands like Ralph Lauren, Puma, P&G, Moët Hennessy and Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Last November, Evrythng announced it would digitize Ralph Lauren’s entire product line, imagining a scale like never before considering the brand’s annual production volume sits at just under 200 million products.
“COVID-19 has made supply chain transparency and visibility absolutely crucial, not only in retail categories such as apparel, pharma and consumer goods, but in health care, government and other sectors as well,” Evrythng chief executive officer and cofounder Niall Murphy, said. “With this new funding, we’ll broaden our global reach to accelerate digitization for more consumer brands and companies in other segments as they strive to create more agile, resilient and sustainable supply chains while gathering data intelligence and scaling their consumer relationships.”
The company has been working with brands and manufacturers to scale the technology across supply chains, launching a number of strategic technology partnerships in Israel, Australia, South Korea and South Africa.
“We’re seeing significant digital acceleration as global brands apply data intelligence and real-time learning from the billions of data points their products generate throughout their supply chain journey — from factory to consumer to resale and recycle — and we’re accelerating our own growth to meet these companies’ needs,” Murphy said.