She saw a London bank's recycling end up in the rubbish, so she built a waste-sorting robot: Danu Robotics raises 5 million dollars

Amy Ma spent years working as a software engineer at a bank in London. An office with every perk imaginable, several kinds of recycling bins - and then she noticed that all those bins were being emptied into the ordinary rubbish. "Even though they have a lot of money, there are loads of different recycling bins that all end up in the same place," she recalls.

The deeper she dug, the bigger the problem got. It was not just her building: the economics of recycling often come down to people picking by hand through conveyor belts of waste, pulling out material that can be reused. "I saw the technology and thought - we can do so much better," Ma says.

That thought became Danu Robotics, a six-year-old company from Edinburgh, Scotland. Its robot H.E.R.O. picks up items with a gripper rather than with suction like its competitors, and the software is constantly refined using AI. The company has now raised 5 million dollars (around 4.5 million euros) in a late seed round.

The numbers on market interest should be read carefully. Danu has letters of intent from two large companies, which is not the same as a contract, and signed contracts worth 500,000 dollars (around 450,000 euros). More than 200 potential customers are on its sales pipeline, and the target market for recycling sorting in Europe and North America is estimated at 20 billion dollars (around 17.8 billion euros). The gap between half a million signed and twenty billion on paper is where most startups live.

Ma's argument is pure maths. Recycling centres make money from the material they manage to separate, so any machine that sorts more pays for itself straight away. She estimates that one plant with a robot on the line would earn an extra 485,000 dollars, against an upfront investment of 160,000 dollars and 24,000 dollars a year for maintenance. Those are her estimates, not measurements from the field - and there are already suction robots on the market from Glacier and RecycleEye.

The next step is a robot that is sturdier, smaller and mobile, so it can leave specialised plants. "When it's smaller, it can be used as a standalone recycling solution at events, in shopping centres, hospitals or airports, so waste gets recycled on the spot," Ma says. If not even a bank with lots of money managed to get its waste to where the bin said it would go, how many other colourful bins in offices and shopping centres end up emptied into the ordinary rubbish?