SuperCircle just locked in a $24M Series A led by Foundry, and the move feels less like a funding round and more like the moment someone finally hits the lights in a warehouse stacked with the fashion industry’s forgotten sins. Chloe Songer, Stuart Ahlum, and Phong Nguyen have been building toward this since the Thousand Fell era, when they learned the hard way that designing recyclable products means nothing if the end-of-life pipeline looks like a back alley no one wants to admit exists. SuperCircle became the answer to that silence, the infrastructure the sector kept pretending it did not need.
The scale of the problem they are tackling is almost comedic in a George Carlin way. The US churns out 11.3M tons of textile waste every year, more than 85% of it buried or burned, while $163B in unsold goods gets tossed globally. Most brands could not trace a returned hoodie if you paid them. SuperCircle built a system that treats every item like it is walking into a detective’s office. NIR fiber analysis. Digital twins. AI sorting that pulls 50+ data points from each piece before deciding if it should head into reuse, resale, downcycling, or fiber-to-fiber rebirth. It is the rare case where transparency is not a buzzword but a workflow.
This $24M is not a trophy shot. It is the accelerant for a platform that already diverted 6M+ textiles and connected 75+ brands across apparel, footwear, and home goods. Reformation, UNIQLO, J.Crew, FIGS, Parachute, tentree, Girlfriend Collective, GUESS, SKIMS. That lineup reads like the industry quietly acknowledging that the old liquidation labyrinth is dying. Foundry, BBG Ventures, Renewal Funds, Elemental Impact, Radicle Impact, Ulu Ventures, Earthshot Ventures, Lyra Ventures, and Blueprint Ventures are leaning into a future where waste becomes feedstock instead of guilt.
What SuperCircle does so well is treat logistics like a narrative. A product enters the system like a character entering a story, and what happens next depends on the data, not some backroom shrug. Chloe Songer brings the intuition of someone who lived the circular footwear grind. Stuart Ahlum translates supply chain reality into motion. Phong Nguyen architects the tech that makes the whole thing hum without drama. Together they turned an industry blind spot into a functioning OS.
Now the runway expands. More facilities across North America. Faster AI. Sharper compliance infrastructure for EPR. Brand onboarding that moves in weeks instead of quarters. And the north star remains the same, 1B+ textiles responsibly diverted by 2030. Big number, sure, but the future usually looks impossible right up until it becomes the baseline everyone else pretends they saw coming.
Startups Startup Funding Venture Capital Series A Fashion Fashion Tech Recycling Circular Economy Infrastructure Data Data Driven Compliance Technology Innovation Tech Ecosystem Startup Ecosystem
