SuperCircle is chipping away at its goal to divert more than 1 billion individual textile products from landfills by 2030.

At Sourcing Journal’s “Road to 2030: Dealing with Detours” forum in New York City last week, Stuart Ahlum, co-founder and chief operating office of SuperCircle, explained how the company sits at the intersection between the retail sector and the end of life or reuse sector.

The enterprise workflow platform routes textiles collected from a wide and fragmented inventory spread across the retail supply chain including returns, distribution centers, stores, logistics fleets, and post-consumer trade-in.  

“We’re strong at sorting and organizing this material,” he said. While traditionally—and still in many parts of the supply chain—this work is manual, with people physically handling products and visually sorting them, SuperCircle is shifting that model by using tools like near-infrared (NIR) and hyperspectral imaging (HSI), along with integrations into PLM systems to pull digital bills of material.

Artificial intelligence built in-house allows the New York City-based company to able to react not only to what’s happening within its own facilities and within its partners facilities, but then also how to react to what’s happening downstream, when capacity or demand-and-matching changes. This kind of “high velocity and high fidelity” sorting, he added, has been valuable for the recycling market, especially as feedstocks are hyper specialized.

Reformation, J. Crew, Guess and Parachute are among SuperCircle’s brand partners. Though many brands are waiting for legislation to mandate textile recycling plans, Ahlum said it is crucial to have their involvement to drive participation. What’s been important for growth is clearly demonstrating that value to brands. He said that includes helping them acquire and retain customers through trade-in programs, increase store traffic, and unlock supply chain efficiencies. There are also financial advantages, like tax incentives, improved recovery rates, and stronger overall supply chain performance.

In December, SuperCircle raised $24 million in a Series A financing round, led by the Boulder-based Foundry Group. Much of the new capital is going toward building out SuperCircle’s machine-learning and product-identification models designed to operate at scale, as well as expanding headcount on the technical team.

Alongside that, Ahlum said the company expanded its flagship facility in North Las Vegas and are developing infrastructure that can be deployed within existing systems to handle growing volumes. He added that a flagship presence on the West Coast, plans for expansion on the East Coast, and a forthcoming partnership in Los Angeles will further promote a more regionalized model.

The industry is beginning to see real results from its investments in circularity. Ahlum said this is showing up across downstream partners in recycling—whether mechanical, thermomechanical, chemical, or other advanced methods—as well as in liquidation and resale channels and donation networks. Brands are also increasingly making this a priority. “It’s kind of a tipping point,” he said.

Having spent a lot of time with impact investors, Ahlum said 2025 was a relatively tough for the impact sector. However, the resiliency of circularity, recycling and end of life solutions have made them “a safe harbor for a lot of these impact investors.” The left side of the aisle, he added, thinks about the impact and environmental component of it, while the right side of the aisle thinks about it as supply chain resilience and manufacturing.

SuperCircle has recycled 10 million textiles to date. Ahlum said it’s a “strong through point that not only does the system, the technology and the business model work, but that we can do this at scale for large enterprise clients.”