Textile Circularity Needs Smart Sorting: reverse.fashion Secures Seven-Figure HTGF Investment

• The Berlin-based AI startup reverse.fashion secures a seven-figure investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF).
• Using intelligent, AI-powered sorting technology, the company streamlines textile categorisation, reduces processing costs, and increases revenues for its customers.
• Focus on market entry: The fresh capital will be used to scale existing pilot projects and drive forward the ongoing market launch of the new industrial sorting solution line.sort.

Berlin-based AI startup reverse.fashion has closed a seven-figure extension of its pre-seed financing round. reverse.fashion will use the fresh capital to drive the commercial rollout of its AI-powered sorting solution — and thereby remove one of the biggest bottlenecks on the path to a circular economy in the textile industry.

Smart Sorting as the Key to Circular Fashion

The transition to a genuine circular economy in the textile industry requires highly efficient sorting processes to accurately direct used textiles to their optimal recovery channels. Existing manual processes are reaching their economic and capacity limits. This is precisely where reverse.fashion steps in with automated sorting systems: using artificial intelligence, the systems precisely categorise and digitise textiles according to condition, style, brand, size, and material composition, among other criteria. This allows garments to be sorted accurately for resale or high-quality recycling.

“By significantly increasing sorting quality and throughput, our customers boost their productivity by 40% while simultaneously achieving a revenue increase of around 20%,” says Dr. Karsten Pufahl, co-founder of reverse.fashion.

Successful Pilots and the Launch of line.sort

The extended pre-seed funding enables the company to reach its next strategic milestone: commercial market entry. In the coming months, the already successfully running pilot projects with the software product co.sort will be intensively continued. At the same time, the market rollout of the full solution line.sort has just kicked off, with the goal of establishing automated sorting processes across the industry at scale.

“With the successful pilot phase and the current market entry, we are entering a new chapter for the company. We are all the more pleased to have HTGF as an experienced partner by our side,” says co-founder Mario Osterwalder of reverse.fashion.

“Rising regulatory requirements such as EPR and EU mandates are driving the transformation of the textile industry. reverse.fashion addresses a central bottleneck with its AI technology and creates the foundation for greater efficiency and profitability. We are very much looking forward to accompanying this visionary team on its journey,” says Dr. Anne Umbach, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF.

About reverse.fashion
reverse.fashion was founded in 2024 as a spin-off from the Technical University of Berlin (Chair of Micro and Precision Devices, Prof. Dr. Dirk Oberschmidt). The technology is based on intellectual property (IP) developed during joint research projects between TU Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), and circular.fashion GmbH. The company was founded by Dr. Karsten Pufahl, Paul Doertenbach, and Mario Osterwalder and currently employs 12 people.