Glacier is building recycling robots into MRF sorting infrastructure

Glacier raised $16 million in Series A funding in April 2025 while tying the round to active recycling operations with Recology. The company says its AI robotic sorters are deployed at Recology's King County material recovery facility in Seattle, with earlier Recology installations in San Francisco and Portland.

Glacier was founded in 2019 in San Francisco by Rebecca Hu and Areeb Malik. Its product combines robot sorting cells with Glacier Vision, a recognition system that identifies and tracks more than 70 material categories across recycling streams. The company reports robots running at up to 60 successful picks per minute and 95% uptime across customer sites.

Glacier Vision tracks material composition and recovery across recycling lines alongside the company’s robotic sorting cells.

Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund had already backed Glacier in 2024, alongside NEA, before the Series A. Amazon later described a pilot with Glacier around bio-based and biodegradable plastics, a category that creates problems for conventional recycling systems because packaging can look similar while requiring different handling paths. Source

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