CleanRobotics is among ten companies still in the running for the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, an international competition for tech companies making a humanitarian difference.
The quest for the $3 million first prize began in the summer of 2016 with more than 100 teams. The competition’s winner will be announced by early April.
CleanRobotics CEO, Charles Yhap admits he’s pleasantly surprised CleanRobotics has made it so far in the competition, but thinks a few factors have helped.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is a pressing problem,” Yhap said. “With the climate crisis coming to a head, any technology that is intelligently trying to attack carbon emissions and climate change is really going to capture the imagination.” Yhap said if CleanRobotics wins, the prize money would go to expanding the company.
Photo – Kate, Program Director at HAX and Ethan, Program Manager at HAX standing beside CleanRobotic’s Trashbot.
We recently completed installed a TrashBot™ in San Francisco. The TrashBot is efficiently sorting waste from recyclables at the HAX office on Jessie Street.
Founded in 2011 by Cyril Ebersweiler, HAX has become one of the largest early-stage investors, offering hardware startups from all over the world the advantages of the startup ecosystems in Shenzhen and San Francisco. The HAX program is a two-stage program that starts in Shenzhen and finishes in San Francisco. Companies that are admitted to the program spend four to eight months in Shenzhen developing technology, followed by two to three months in San Francisco, working on business development, fundraising, and growth. You can learn more about the program here
CleanRobotics is part of the HAX portfolio and went through the program in 2016. The first working prototypes were built during the Shenzhen program. Charles (CEO) describes his experience with HAX as “A whirl-wind of incredible productivity that is not possible anywhere else in the world. The pace at which you can test hardware and iterate ideas is astounding. The team’s incredible support provides a soft-landing and a running start to make the absolute most of the time you’re there.”
TrashBot received a warm welcome by the team at HAX and has already started generating buzz among the investors visiting the HAX office. We are beyond excited about this installation and the expansion of our footprint. San Francisco is the second city, after Seattle, on the West Coast to get a TrashBot.
If you get a chance, go check out the TrashBot and let us know if you have any comments. We love hearing from people who share our mission and want to help us improve our product.
Recology has been recycling long before there was even an industry for it. The company’s founders immigrated to San Francisco in the mid-1800s looking for opportunity, eventually finding work doing what no one else wanted to do – picking up other people’s garbage. They sorted through trash to find salvageable material by washing, packaging, and selling bottles, and sorting and separating rags and papers from other refuse materials.
Today, Recology is an integrated resource recovery company, providing materials collection, processing, commodity sales, and outreach and education to customers throughout California, Oregon, and Washington. Recology finds new and innovative ways to process and reuse what was once considered waste, collecting and recovering recyclables to be re-purposed into new products. Recology is 100% employee-owned, with over 3,600 employees throughout its 60 facilities on the west coast.
On average, Recology recovers over 600 million pounds of recyclables each year, implementing recycling programs and building infrastructure at its facilities to reduce landfill-bound materials. With diversion and recovery goals in mind, Recology’s King County operation has partnered with CleanRobotics to pilot the TrashBot technology.
TrashBots have been installed at Recology’s Administrative office, as well as the company’s state-of-the-art Material Recovery Facility and Education Center in the Seattle area.
“Recology hopes to showcase TrashBot technology as an innovative approach to an important problem,” explains Derek Ruckman, Vice President & Group Manager of Recology’s Pacific Northwest operations. “TrashBots provide an opportunity to engage and educate consumers at the primary point of interaction – those precious few seconds spent tossing materials into the bin.”
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