Renasens has raised €10M to commercialize a CO₂ process that separates and recovers fibers from blended textile waste without water or toxic chemicals.
Renasens, a deeptech company based in Stockholm, has raised €10 million in seed funding to scale a textile recycling process it says can do what existing methods cannot: recover intact fibers from the blended and treated fabrics that make up the majority of post-consumer clothing waste.
The round was led by Extantia, a European climate tech fund, with participation from Course Corrected VC and continued backing from Norrsken Launcher, the impact-focused accelerator that supported the company at an earlier stage.
The Problem No One Has Solved
The textile industry generates more than 12 million tonnes of waste annually in Europe alone. Less than one percent of that is recycled back into new fibers. The reason is not a lack of intent or investment — it is a technical constraint that has resisted solution for decades. The vast majority of discarded clothing is made from blended materials: cotton mixed with polyester, treated with dyes, coatings and finishes that make conventional recycling processes ineffective. Most existing methods can handle pure fibers reasonably well. They cannot handle what people actually throw away.
Renasens is attacking that constraint directly. Its platform uses modified supercritical CO₂ — carbon dioxide held at conditions where it exhibits properties of both a liquid and a gas — to separate and decolor blended textiles, recovering the underlying fibers without water and without toxic chemicals. The recovered cotton and polyester can then be reintroduced into standard manufacturing processes without requiring factories to purchase new equipment, which the company says is a deliberate design choice to lower the barrier to adoption across Europe’s fragmented textile supply chain.
Also Read: “The AI Economy Has Moved From the Training Phase Into the Inference Phase,” Says Jensen Huang
“Post-consumer textile waste has long been considered both technically and structurally unsolvable,” said Dr. Jade Bouledjouidja, Renasens’s founder and chief executive. “We have developed a process that makes fiber recycling viable at industrial scale, and are now building the infrastructure and partnerships to support its adoption across Europe.”
Early Customers and Regulatory Tailwinds
The company is not operating purely at the laboratory stage. Renasens has already begun supplying recovered cotton and polyester fibers to manufacturers in Portugal and Italy — two of Europe’s most significant textile manufacturing centers — providing early commercial validation for a process that has historically struggled to survive the transition from pilot to production.
The regulatory environment is also moving in this direction. The European Union introduced mandatory textile collection systems in 2025, and extended producer responsibility schemes — which would require brands and manufacturers to take financial responsibility for the end-of-life management of their products — are expected to follow by 2027. Together, those measures are expected to create sustained demand for industrial-scale recycling solutions that do not yet exist at sufficient capacity.
Also Read: At Google Cloud Next, a Unified Push to Fortify Enterprise Cybersecurity
The $10 million in seed funding will support the construction of a pilot plant in Borås, Sweden — a city with deep roots in the Nordic textile industry — and allow the company to begin direct fiber supply into European manufacturing at greater volume.
Renasens did not disclose its current production capacity, revenue figures, or the specific manufacturers it is supplying in Portugal and Italy.
