DePoly develops a chemical recycling process that breaks PET and polyester plastics down to their original monomers without using fossil fuels. The company raised a $23M Seed round to fund a 500-tonne-per-year showcase plant in Monthey, Switzerland, scheduled to open in summer 2025. The showcase plant is intended to demonstrate the technology at industrial scale and validate DePoly’s roadmap toward a circular plastics market. Investors in the round include a strategic investment from MassMutual Ventures alongside BASF Venture Capital, Beiersdorf Venture Capital, and Zürcher Kantonalbank. DePoly has collaborations with Odlo, PTI, and Beiersdorf across fashion, consumer goods, and cosmetics. Management highlights in the articles include Co-Founder and CEO Samantha Anderson and CFO David Hanf, who joined in 2024, and the company plans to refine its technology and pursue a commercial-scale plant to process larger volumes and compete with virgin pricing at scale. DePoly uses a chemical recycling process to convert PET plastics and polyester textiles back into their original monomers (PTA and MEG). Its room-temperature, standard-pressure process requires no washing, pre-sorting, or melting and can handle contaminated, mixed-color, and textile waste streams that mechanical recycling cannot. The company currently operates a pilot plant that processes 50 tons per year and serves industries including post-consumer packaging, textiles, fashion, and post-industrial streams; it reports five customers. DePoly is building a 500-ton showcase plant to demonstrate commercial scale and is scaling its technology to recover other materials such as PP, cotton, polyurethanes (PU), polylactic acid (PLA), and PBT. Founded in 2020 by Samantha Anderson, Bardiya Valizadeh and Christopher Ireland, the company has a team of 13 people. It sells recovered raw chemical components back to manufacturers, positioning its output as virgin quality to enable a circular economy for plastics. DePoly is an EPFL spin-off chemical-technology startup that converts low-value PET waste into high-value chemical monomers like TPA to enable a circular economy. It has developed a depolymerization process that returns PET to its two main chemical components identical in quality to oil-derived raw materials. The process operates at room temperature without applied pressure and uniquely tolerates mixed plastics (PET with PVC, PP, PS, etc.), mixed colors, dirty PET, and fabrics/fibers. DePoly sells the recovered monomers back to industry as feedstock for PET production. With the CHF1.3M pre-seed financing, the company will develop an enhanced recycling pre-demo plant to depolymerize PET into the raw materials required for PET production. DePoly has also been supported by Venture Kick and TOP 100. DePoly has developed a chemical recycling process that selectively treats PET in mixed plastic waste to produce chemical intermediates usable to make 100% recycled PET resins. The process works at room temperature without added heat or pressure, handles mixed colour, multi‑layer and polyester fibre PET, and uses sustainable, environmentally friendly chemicals. DePoly says every ton recycled saves energy equivalent to four European households’ annual electricity use, 18 barrels of oil, or ten London–New York passenger flights. The company collaborates with EPFL Valais‑Wallis and was founded in February 2020 by Samantha Anderson, Christopher Ireland and Bardiya Valizadeh. It has received support from VentureKick, Climate‑KIC, EPFL, Venture and CleanTechAlps and is currently conducting a seed fundraising round to build a larger demo plant. The recently awarded FIT Tech Seed loan will fund a 10 kg pilot plant footprint and help cover staff salaries to operate the unit. With those plants, DePoly targets PET resin producers, plastic recyclers and chemical industry customers.

Total raised

$38M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Apr 2025