Elastane gives performance apparel its stretch. It can also make the polyester surrounding it difficult to recycle.

Ravel has raised $8.2 million to move its blended-textile recycling technology from a Seattle pilot plant toward commercial-scale operations. The company is betting that preserving the polyester polymer will prove cheaper than breaking it apart and rebuilding it.

The oversubscribed seed round was led by One Small Planet, with significant participation from AP Ventures. Overlay Capital and Lichen Ventures joined the round, while existing investors At One Ventures, Collateral Good and Betterway Ventures provided follow-on funding.

Ravel plans to use the money to increase production, run supply-chain trials and bring fiber, yarn and textile manufacturers on board. Some specifics remain under wraps: Asked by Sourcing Journal about process parameters, production costs, facility locations, launch dates and partner commitments, Ravel cited proprietary information and commercial sensitivities.

Its Seattle pilot was designed to process 20 to 24 metric tons annually, co-founder and CEO Zahlen Titcomb told Sourcing Journal. Production runs focus on making samples and reducing technical risk, he said, so the plant does not run continuously.

Ravel has also begun running its process through a contract manufacturer with greater capacity. Titcomb said the company expects its first commercial deployments to process roughly 10,000 metric tons annually.

“The technology works. We know how to scale it. We’re proving that out,” Titcomb said. “But the commercial relationships are the piece that we’re spending a lot of effort on.”

Those relationships will determine whether the technology can deliver on Ravel’s central pitch: producing textile-derived recycled polyester that can enter existing fiber and yarn supply chains without a green premium or subsidy.

Ravel calls its technology Purification Recycling. Rather than mechanically shredding waste into lower-grade fibers or depolymerizing polyester into its chemical building blocks, the process uses a wash mechanism to remove elastane, dyes and other contaminants while attempting to preserve the underlying polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.

Ravel distinguishes the process from both mechanical and chemical recycling because it does not shred the textile into fiber or break the PET into monomers. The resulting polyester feedstock is intended to move through existing manufacturing systems to become new fiber, yarn, fabric and eventually clothing.

Blends “make clothing durable, functional and affordable,” Titcomb said. “But blends are not recyclable with existing infrastructure. That’s where Ravel comes in.”

The presence of even a relatively small amount of elastane can complicate conventional polyester recycling. The polyurethane-based stretch fiber can interfere with melt processing and contaminate the monomers recovered through some chemical recycling methods.

A pending U.S. patent application assigned to Ravel describes removing elastane and other unwanted minority polymers with purification processes selected to leave the target polyester largely intact. The application also outlines potential processes for polyester-cotton, cotton-elastane, nylon-elastane and other blends, although Ravel’s current product is textile-derived recycled PET.

The company said its ability to accept a wider range of blends could reduce the expense of separating textile waste into extremely pure feedstock streams.

Titcomb said that flexibility could allow garment factories to send polyester-elastane cutting scraps together rather than segregating each composition as production lines change. Ravel expects post-industrial waste to provide the feedstock for the first phase of its commercial growth, reflecting both its concentration near apparel-production hubs and its greater consistency compared with discarded clothing.

“You have to make something that gives someone else an easier day, not a harder day,” Titcomb said. “You can’t ask a factory owner to change everything because you’re an innovator.”

That does not mean sorting disappears. Ravel’s patent application describes cleaning and shredding incoming textiles, removing metal and other nontextile components and separating waste into broad material categories before purification. Patent applications also describe possible configurations rather than necessarily documenting the exact setup operating at a company’s plant.

Feedstock has become a recurring stumbling block for textile recyclers. Facilities need enough material of predictable composition to run efficiently, but discarded clothing arrives with widely varying fiber blends, dyes, finishes, trims and contamination.

“The biggest driver of success for any recycling business is feedstock,” said Helen Lin, a partner at At One Ventures. “How much of the waste stream that is being utilized is actually usable? How pure does it need to be for the processing to work viably? How far does it need to be transported?”

Ravel says its process can accept post-industrial and post-consumer textile waste. Its patent portfolio also includes a separate application covering the recovery and reuse of elastane.

Ravel reported that a preliminary third-party life-cycle assessment found its process could use as much as 86 percent less fossil fuel and 98 percent less water than conventional PET production. Those estimates reflect modeled results rather than operating data from a commercial plant.

The same distinction applies to price. Ravel says it is targeting parity with conventional textile materials, while One Small Planet investor Jack Wielebinski described a pathway to producing recycled materials more cheaply than their virgin counterparts.

“The pilot plant isn’t designed to make money,” Titcomb said. “The pilot plant is designed to improve the product, scale the business and scale the technology.”

He said preliminary engineering for a facility processing roughly 10,000 metric tons per year indicates that the economics can “pencil” and make the project financeable.

The funding will support commercial readiness, output validation and larger production trials. Ravel is seeking partners to supply blended waste and test its recycled material in existing manufacturing systems.

Titcomb said Ravel is accelerating relationships with waste suppliers, fiber producers, yarn manufacturers and brands, with the goal of connecting them around the same material stream.

Extended producer responsibility laws could eventually increase both the supply of collected textiles and brands’ demand for recycling capacity. They will not, by themselves, guarantee that collected garments arrive in usable condition—or that recycled output can compete with virgin polyester.

At pilot scale, Ravel’s process has drawn investors. Its next proof point is less elegant: a plant that can run on inconsistent waste, sell its output without a green premium and account for everything the process removes.

“The hardest thing that we’re working on right now is getting everyone else to work together to make it go from A to B to C to D, and then back to A again,” Titcomb said. “There’s a whole supply chain to connect.”