Manufacturing has a dirty little secret. For every car rolling off the line or every Fortune 500 filing polished for Wall Street, there’s a graveyard of surplus, machines, parts, and raw materials that sit idle, bleeding capital and rotting in warehouses. In the U.S. alone, that waste hits $350B/yr. Globally? Over $2T. That’s not inefficiency, that’s a structural tax on industry. For decades, most manufacturers just shrugged, wrote it off, and carried on.
Amplio, founded in 2021 by Trey Closson (CEO) and Taha Zinifi (Head of Product), decided that story needed a rewrite. Closson’s resume screams logistics operator, Georgia-Pacific, Flexport, Kuehne + Nagel, while Zinifi brings sharp product DNA, data science from École Polytechnique, and Y Combinator pedigree. Together, they built an AI platform that doesn’t just record waste, it recodes it. Amplio’s agentic AI parses massive inventories, finds redeployment opportunities across facilities, and when that fails, it appraises every SKU and moves it to a private marketplace of vetted buyers. Waste morphs into liquidity. Dead assets turn into capital.
That vision just got a major co-sign. Amplio locked in an $11.1M Series A on 9/24/25, led by Hitachi Ventures and Yamaha Motor Ventures, with ongoing support from Construct Capital, Slow Ventures, Alpaca VC, and High Alpha Capital. Add in the $6M seed from 12/22 (backers included Koch Disruptive Tech, Flexport Ventures, and angels like Sean Henry of Stord) and Amplio now sits at $17.1M raised to date. As Pete Bastien of Hitachi Ventures put it, the team proved circularity can scale and pay. That’s validation with teeth.
The traction is equally sharp. Fortune 500 names like Georgia-Pacific, NCR Voyix, and Holland America already use Amplio, seeing recovery rates up to 5x industry standards. Thousands of tons of equipment have been diverted from waste streams, millions of dollars recovered. This isn’t sustainability window-dressing, it’s a hard-nosed economic unlock wrapped in AI. With fresh capital, Amplio will expand its go to market push, deepen agentic AI systems, and grow into new surplus categories: rolling stock, raw materials, finished goods. The bigger the pile of leftovers, the bigger the upside.
The real shift is philosophical. Amplio reframed surplus as an asset class, not a liability. Manufacturers can now treat inefficiency as optional. When AI has the discipline to find value in forgotten corners, balance sheets stop bleeding and resilience becomes tangible.
