Textile innovations company Evrnu raised $15 million in Series B financing to scale and meet the demand for its fiber regeneration platform, NuCycl, from companies in fashion as well as new markets like home furnishings.
With NuCycl, discarded clothing is broken down and transformed into a pristine new fiber engineered to maintain performance characteristics for creating new premium textile products. Evrnu has leveraged this technology to partner with and manufacture products for brands like Levi Strauss, Adidas and Stella McCartney.
Led by FullCycle Climate Partners, a firm that invests in growth stage companies with developed climate-critical infrastructure technology, this strategic financing round will expand Evrnu’s facilities and operations in South Carolina, where it currently operates a recycling plant, and help deliver high volumes of NuCycl fibers to the fashion industry.
The round will also enable the Seattle-based certified B Corporation to increase hiring in growth functions and technical roles as it ramps up its fiber regeneration platform. The company is hoping that it can meet the scale required to alleviate dependency on virgin resources and create material emissions reductions throughout the fashion value chain.
NuCycl-made fibers include regenerative cellulosics, regenerative cellulosic solvent systems, regenerative polyester, recoverable stretch and bio-engineered fibers.
“Over the last few years, we have iterated and fine-tuned NuCycl technologies to meet and exceed the quality and performance demands of the luxury industry,” Evrnu co-founding CEO Stacy Flynn said in a statement. “We are now proving these technologies at scale, with short-term plans for global expansion.”
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FullCycle will also serve as a project financing partner, Evrnu said. Supply chain partners and brands are also joining the round as co-investors including apparel manufacturer Hansae, Danish apparel retailer Bestseller, and PDS Venture, PDS Multinational Fashion’s venture tech portfolio.
This is the second major financing for Evrnu, which closed a $9.1 million Series A round in late 2019.
“Brands know that they need to materially address their emissions and that their customers are watching and demanding that they do better,” said FullCycle partner Kyle Adkins. “FullCycle is excited to partner with Evrnu to build and deploy true molecular circularity with the capacity and scale to meet the demands of even the largest participants in this global industry.”
Evrnu’s technologies divert tens of millions of tons of landfill-bound textile waste back into the value chain. The NuCycl platform depolymerizes textile waste and repolymerize it into fibers that match or exceed the quality of the original inputs, the company claims. Evrnu further states that its own recycled fiber can be recycled five times without sacrificing quality.
The company believes it has developed the technologies to address the recycling of 90 percent of all apparel, which ultimately help make the circular economy a reality. Evrnu says its technologies have already been granted one patent, with and several others pending.
Additionally, the material innovator says it is on course to deploy technologies that allow for all textiles to be successfully recycled by 2030.
“All gold that’s ever been sourced is still in circulation—it gets melted and casted over and over again,” said Evrnu chief technology officer Christopher Stanev. “That’s Evrnu’s goal for textile fibers: Our technologies enable them to stay in circulation, while maintaining their performance attributes.”
Enabled with this financing, Evrnu will be rolling out each technology in partnership with global supply chain partners to meet the needs of this emerging market and scale required for material impact. Evrnu has advanced R&D contracts under way in fashion, as well as in new markets, such as home furnishings and automotive.
Fiber and textile innovators have amassed millions in financing and high-profile partnerships this year amid urgent calls for fashion to curb its environmental impact and overreliance on virgin resources. Spinnova went public with financial backing from H&M, Adidas and The North Face, while Patagonia partnered with Natural Fiber Welding and Infinited Fiber Company, which garnered Zalando’s investment weeks ago.