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A little over two years after its $753 million acquisition of the prescription medicine delivery service Pillpack, Amazon has finally launched Amazon Pharmacy, its online and mobile prescription medication ordering and fulfillment service.

Using a secure pharmacy profile, customers can add their insurance information, manage prescriptions and choose payment options all through Amazon’s service.

After launching its own line of over-the-counter drugs in 2019, this is arguably Amazon’s broadest push into the healthcare business to-date, one that could open up big new revenue opportunities for the company, especially as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic pushes consumers both toward more remote care, and using online channels for all their shopping needs.

Indeed, this is also more than just Amazon’s continued expansion as a one-stop shop for medicine and wellness. For many consumers, shopping at the pharmacy and shopping for groceries goes hand-in-hand (and of course over decades, many standalone pharmacies have moved more into becoming like stores selling food, while those selling food also have pharmacy counters).

Having this alongside Amazon’s very aggressive and ambitious grocery and food play — which mirrors its drug strategy by spanning its own brands as well as those it has bought it, including Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Amazon’s own brand items, and physical Amazon grocery stores — gives the company a more complete experience, where shoppers can more fully replace their shopping needs using Amazon alone.

While Amazon Pharmacy looks to be a US-only launch for now, it’s a global opportunity. Online pharmacy services are projected to hit revenues of $131 billion by 2025 worldwide. Prescription drugs, meanwhile, have been estimated to be a $904 billion industry this year, growing to nearly $1.3 trillion by 2025.

“As more and more people look to complete everyday errands from home, pharmacy is an important and needed addition to the Amazon online store,” said Doug Herrington, Senior Vice President of North American Consumer at Amazon, in a statement. “PillPack has provided exceptional pharmacy service for individuals with chronic health conditions for over six years. Now, we’re expanding our pharmacy offering to Amazon.com, which will help more customers save time, save money, simplify their lives, and feel healthier.”

In addition to the basic Amazon Pharmacy service, Amazon is rolling out special features for Prime members: those subscribing to Amazon’s premium membership tier can receive unlimited, free two-day delivery on Amazon orders, the company said in a statement.

Prime members can also save on medications when they pay without insurance on Amazon Pharmacy — and receive the same discounts at 50,000 other participating pharmacies nationwide. Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit can save members up to 805 off of generic and 40% of of brand name medications when paying without insurance.

Prime members can access their prescription savings at checkout and all Amazon customers will be able to shop for medications — including branded and generic versions and different form factors and dosages — and order them online.

Amazon is also letting customers compare prices with their insurance co-pay, without insurance or with the savings available through the Prime prescription savings plan to choose the lowest option. Amazon is also staffing a pharmacy service accessible at all hours so that customers can answer questions about their medications.

“We understand the importance of access to affordable medication, and we believe Prime members will find tremendous value with the new Amazon Prime prescription savings benefit,” said Jamil Ghani, Vice President, Amazon Prime, in a statement. “Our goal is for Prime to make members’ lives easier and more convenient every day, and we’re excited to extend the incredible savings, seamless shopping experience, and fast, free delivery members know and love with Prime to Amazon Pharmacy.”

The launch of the new Pharmacy service within Amazon is a blow to other discount prescription services like the publicly traded GoodRx and companies like RxSaver and delivery services like ExactCare Pharmacy.

The competition from Amazon was likely one reason why GoodRx began offering telemedicine services as a point of differentiation and to move up the value chain. It will be interesting to see if Amazon will also move to providing virtual care for more than its employees. Last year, the company rolled out Amazon Care for its workers in Seattle as part of a pilot service that provided both in-person and telemedicine services.

At the time, the company limited its pilot to employees, but (as TechCrunch reported) the highly publicized nature of their approach, and the amount of product development that clearly went into developing the initial app, user experience and brand could indicate that it has the broader U.S. market in mind as a potential expansion opportunity down the line. Reports from last year also suggested that Amazon could make a play in consumer health with new wearable fitness tracking devices, which could very nicely complement insurance and healthcare services offered at the enterprise and individual level.

Turtlemint, an Indian startup that is helping consumers identify and purchase the most appropriate insurance policies for them, has raised $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to reach more users in small cities and towns in the world’s second largest internet market.

The new round, the five-year-old Mumbai-headquartered startup’s Series D, was led by GGV Capital . American Family Ventures, MassMutual Ventures and SIG, and existing investors Blume Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Dream Incubator and Trifecta Capital also participated in the round, which brings Turtlemint’s total to-date raise to $55 million.

Only a fraction of India’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance. According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017. An average Indian makes about $2,100 a year, according to the World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

A range of startups in India are trying to disrupt this market, which analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated to be worth $3 billion in a report they recently sent to clients.

Another major reason why existing insurance firms are struggling to sell to consumers is because they are too reliant on on-ground advisors.

Instead of bypassing these advisors, Turtlemint is embracing them. It works with over 100,000 such agents, equipping them with digital tools to offer wider and more relevant recommendations to consumers and speed-up the onboarding process, which has traditionally required a lot of paperwork.

These advisors, who continue to command over 90% of all insurance sales in the country, “play a critical role in bridging the gap in tier 2 and 3 towns and cities, where low physical presence of insurance companies greatly impacts seamless access to insurance products and information,” the startup said.

Turtlemint works with over 40 insurance companies in India and serves as a broker, charging these firms a commission for policies it sells. The startup said it serves more than 1.5 million customers today.

“By developing products for the micro-entrepreneurs and the rising middle class, Turtlemint has an opportunity to have a positive impact on India’s economy,” said Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, in a statement. “[Turtlemint co-founders] Dhirendra, Anand, and their team built an incredible platform that enables over 100,000 mom-and-pop financial advisors to serve consumers’ best interests with digital tools, helping middle-class families in India get insured with the best products available.”

More to follow…

Autodesk, the U.S. publicly listed software and services company that targets engineering and design industries, has acquired Norway’s Spacemaker, a startup that has developed AI-supported software for urban development.

The price of the acquisition is $240 million in a mostly all-cash deal. Spacemaker’s VC backers include European firms Atomico and Northzone, which co-led the company’s $25 million Series A round in 2019. Other investors on the cap table include Nordic real estate innovator NREP, Nordic property developer OBOS, U.K. real estate technology fund Round Hill Ventures and Norway’s Construct Venture.

Founded by Håvard Haukeland, Carl Christensen and Anders Kvale, and based in Oslo, Norway — but with a number of other outposts around the globe — the 115-person Spacemaker team develops and sells cloud-based software that utilises AI to help architects, urban designers and real estate developers make more informed design decisions. By having Spacemaker look over a designer’s shoulder, as CEO Haukeland likes to say, the software aims to augment the work of humans and not only speed up the urban development design and planning process but also improve outcomes, including around sustainability and quality of life for the people who will ultimately live in the resulting spaces.

To do this, the platform enables users to quickly “generate, optimize, and iterate on” design alternatives, taking into account design criteria and data like terrain, maps, wind, lighting, traffic and zoning, etc. Spacemaker then returns design alternatives optimized for the full potential of the site.

“It was never our plan in the beginning of 2020 to sell the company,” Haukeland told me on a call last week. “But when we started talking to Autodesk, who have reached out for a while, we realized they share our vision. And we understood that this can put our vision on steroids and we can really reach that vision much faster. And that’s what drives us, that’s what we want to do: We want to realize our vision and get our offering out in the world, at the hands of millions of architects and engineers and developers”.

During a call late Friday, Andrew Anagnost, CEO and president of Autodesk, said the acquisition of Spacemaker is in line with the company’s long-term strategy of using the power of the cloud, “cheap compute” and machine learning to evolve and change the way people design things.

“This is something strategically we’ve been working towards, both with the products we make internally with the capabilities we roll out that are more cutting edge, and also our initiative when we look at companies we’re interested in acquiring,” he said.

“We’ve been watching this space for a while; the application that Spacemaker has built we would characterize it, from our terminology, as ‘generative design’ for urban planning, meaning the machine generating options and option explorations for urban planning-type applications.

“Spacemaker really stands out in terms of applying cloud computing, artificial intelligence, data science, to really helping people explore multiple options and come up with better decisions”.

Post-acquisition, the plan is to keep Spacemaker as an autonomous unit within Autodesk and (hopefully) not interfere too much with the formula and startup ethos that has seemingly been working, while also enabling the team to have the resources needed to continue on their mission.

“They want to let Spacemaker be Spacemaker; they’re not [just] acquiring our product, they’re acquiring the potential and the journey we’re on as a team,” says Haukeland. “They’re acquiring the mission we’re on, the way we work, the knowledge we have, [and] all our failed attempts along the way… so it’s much more than just swallowing the product”.

That knowledge and those “failed attempts” span not only the Spacemaker CEO’s own background as an architect, but the path to product-market-fit and the technology itself.

“Initially they targeted architects directly, but realised that they have relatively small budgets,” recalls Michiel Kotting, who led the startup’s Series A round on behalf of Northzone. “From Håvards experience in the industry they decided to pivot to serving [property] developers who then give the software to their in-house and external architects. They were surprised to see that they could get significant six-figure deals per project out of the gate”.

He also says the team was convinced early on that generative design is the future. “Rather than be software that can do what architects used to do on paper, the full power of modern day compute is put at the disposal of architects,” he told me. “The path to get there has been a bit like Deep Mind’s AlphaGo project — a myriad of different techniques, ML, AI, rules based optimisation etc. that jointly provide the most powerful result, rather than just ‘lets just throw the latest deep learning model at the project and see what sticks’ “.

“They were actually solving a problem, a problem that our customers were telling us that they wanted solved and liked the way they were solving it,” says Anagnost. “So it wasn’t just a great team with a great idea and some great technology, they actually solved the problem. And I think this is really important: You can play with technology all you like, but if you can’t find the intersection of either creating a whole new opportunity or market or solving an existing problem in a completely new and disruptive way, then you really haven’t created something useful. They’ve created something useful”.

“When we led Spacemaker’s Series A round less than two years ago, we saw a world-leading product and a company with the DNA to push the boundaries of what was possible in applying AI to architecture and property development,” says Atomico’s Ben Blume . “As the global leader in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) software, and with products that set the standard across the industry, Autodesk’s acquisition validates our belief that world-class AI products are being built here in Europe”.

In building out the product iteratively, Northzone’s Kotting says the Spacemaker team “honed the art of ‘human in the loop’ “. “The generative design calculates the possible solution space, and the architect can then navigate that space and figure out interesting starting points and see the impact of design choices. So you can design something that is both beautiful/fit for purpose and optimal”.

He also doesn’t think the team would have been able to do that if it wasn’t for a combination of architectural talent and “bleeding-edge” software designers. This is where founding the company in Norway may have been an advantage. “It might not be so obvious you’d find a lot of those in Norway, but some of the hard-core optimisation problems in oil and gas are very similar to the Spacemaker problem, so it is actually a very fertile country for that,” adds Kotting.

The challenge then wasn’t Norway’s talent pool but persuading the most talented people to work for a startup. This is where Spacemaker’s mission, and Nordic culture more generally, was also a strength.

Reflects Haukeland: “What we experienced in the early days is that when you’re trying to solve such a hard problem, [with] such an ambitious journey, you need incredibly talented people who are able to get a lot of autonomy and solve problems, because there are so many problems you need to solve. And I think what we experienced in Norway four years ago was that a lot of the really good people went into either oil and gas or, you know, consulting. And what we saw was that people really want to join a mission where they can have a positive impact, and they can use their capacity and their talent and their brains to solve difficult problems. We were lucky to get so much incredible talent to join us because of that”.

Anagnost also cites Spacemaker’s culture and its European vantage-point as a differentiator. “This is a European high technology company using cutting-edge algorithms and approaches in the cloud and they start it from an ethical framework that might not be as common as startups in other places,” he tells me. “So if you were to ask me what was differentiating here, I think the ethical framework they’re coming in with this is, ‘we’re going to use this data to enable this audience to do a better job of what they do every day. And we’re going to do it in such a way that we’re partnering with the customers, and we’re also creating better outcomes, not just for them but for the whole ecosystem of stakeholders… and one of the stakeholders is the environment of the area. That ethos from a technology company, probably, you know, rose up faster in the European market than it might have in some of the U.S. markets where it’s more about, ‘let’s plow through things,’ and not so much about what is my ethical foundation here and what I’m trying to accomplish?”

However, with Europe’s current infatuation with unicorns — and a growing track record of producing companies valued at $1 billion dollars (or a lot more) — one legitimate question that can be asked is did the Norwegian startup sell too early?

“I think that’s a very VC-oriented perspective, because what it’s really about is, are they selling out earlier on the return for the VCs?” argues the Autodesk CEO. “I think if you look at it through the lens of what the employees and the company is trying to accomplish, they’re going to be able to accomplish more working closely inside of Autodesk than they would have, even if they continue to accept dollars and have their valuation increase. Maybe the VCs might see a smaller return, [but] I don’t think the employees are going to see a bigger net return to their vision. And if you’ve talked to these people, they’re very passionate about what they do”.

“Even though for our taste this exit comes early in the journey, we share the enthusiasm for achieving maximum impact fast, and have seen in the process how important Autodesk believes the Spacemaker product is in their future,” says Kotting.

Meanwhile, Haukeland maintains that Spacemaker has only built “5% of what can be built” and says the industry as a whole is at the beginning of a huge transformation in the way people work. “When you go from designing something and checking how it works to asking your computer for help and having the computer advising you on your shoulder, it’s really changing the game. That is such a fundamental change that it’s more than just putting a product out there. It’s really a shift that’s going to be changing the industry over the years”.

“We’re going to continue to encourage them and drive them to build out that product,” says Anagnost, “but they’re also going to have other avenues to extend their technology and other places where they can link their technology to parts of the Autodesk ecosystem”.

Lego’s partnership with Nintendo delivered a pretty awesome debut earlier this year with the interactive Lego Super Mario Starter Course, and now it’s following that up with additional sets designed to complement the first. These include a new ‘Master Your Adventure Maker Set,’ which adds customization options by tweaking Lego Mario’s response via three new bricks, and a new way to shuffle the rules for each level. Lego and Nintendo are also releasing additional themed Expansion sets, new power-ups for Mario, and a second series of mystery characters to incorporate into level builds.

The Master Your Adventure Maker Set includes 366 pieces in total, and will retail for $59.99. The Expansion sets include a Chain Chomp jungle-themed playset ($19.99), a Piranha Plan puzzle challenge set ($29.99), and a new Poison-themed biome for Mario to explore featuring Wiggler ($39.99). The two new power-ups for Lego Mario are his Penguin suit, and his Tanooki suit, which retail for $9.99 each respectively.

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Each new Series 2 Character Pack retails for $4.99. These come in packaging that doesn’t reveal their contents until opened, adding some degree of chance to which of the new characters you end up with. The Series 2 characters include Huckit Crab, Spiny Cheep Cheep, Ninji, Foo, Parachute Goomba, Fly Guy, Poison Mushroom, Para-Beetle, Thwimp or Bone Goomba.

These will all go on sale starting January 1, both from Lego direct and from its retail partners. That’s just after the holiday rush, which seems like a bit of a miss for what you’d expect would be a popular set of gifts, but Nintendo’s still selling the original starter course and other kits

Forto, a digital freight forwarder which has experienced a boom during the pandemic, has raised another $50 million in funding. This takes its total investment to $73 million after it raised $23m in debt financing from the European Investment Bank this year. It’s now raised $126 million in total, since its launch in 2016.

The round was led by Inven Capital, a growth fund out of the Czech Republic. Additional investment came from Iris Capital, with strong participation from current investors, including Rider Global, Northzone, Cherry Ventures and the Italian venture fund H14. Additionally, Maersk, the largest ocean carrier in the world, has ‘significantly’ – says the startup – added to its existing investment.

The platform gives customers real-time data and on-time delivery, while typically reducing their administrative supply chain costs by 30%. It also displays an emissions rating for possible transport options, allowing companies to track carbon emissions.

Forto will be using the new funding to accelerate the development of its supply chain management solutions by adding order management and value-added services. It will also be expanding its European and Asian operations following the recent opening of a Singapore office and the extension of its operational presence to 5 offices in Asia.

“In the last few quarters, we have significantly exceeded our growth plans and have increased our volumes by 300% year over year. And this despite challenging trading conditions, which have forced companies to face significant capacity constraints and rate volatility, “ explained Co-Founder Michael Wax, who co-leads the firm alongside Co-Founder Erik Muttersbach and Dr. Michael Ardelt.

Petr Míkovec, CEO at Inven Capital said: ““We strongly believe in Forto’s vision to simplify international carriage of goods and make shipping containers as simple as sending an email. Not only do customers get incredible insights into their supply chain, they can also make smarter, sustainable decisions.”

“Forto has proven to be essential in a sector which is under increasing pressure amidst a global pandemic and is dominated by fragmented, non-digital incumbents,” added Michiel Kotting, Partner at Northzone.

Forto’s supply chain management solutions are now used by over 2,500 customers, including industrial manufacturer Viessmann, consumer goods giant Miele and eCommerce brand Home24. It made the list of the Top 20 Freight Forwarder from Asia to Europe in just under 4 years of existence.

In a period of social distancing, making new professional connections feels harder than ever. So Amsterdam-based Cooper is building a network that’s all about making and receiving introductions.

“Everything that happens in the network is based on on the foundation of introductions,” CEO Robert Gaal told me. “You should never get an unwanted message, and there’s no such thing as a connection request, because it’s not necessary if you have an introduction.”

The startup is launching internationally today and announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.

Gaal (who co-founded the company with CTO Emiel van Liere) described Cooper as “a private professional network that’s not about how many connections do I have, it’s about bringing the people that you already trust into a circle.”

That’s in contrast with existing professional networking sites, which are most useful as “directories” of online résumés, and usually emphasize the quantity of connections, rather than the quality. (I’ll admit that on LinkedIn, I’m connected to a bunch of people who I barely know at all.)

So Cooper tries to take the opposite approach, limiting users’ connections to people they really know. To do this, it can pull data from a user’s online calendar, and it also provides them with a personal invite code that they can share with their professional contacts.

Users then post requests or opportunities, which are viewable by their connections and by friends of friends, who can offer to make useful introductions via email or in Cooper itself.

In fact, Gaal said that during the initial beta test, multiple people have successfully used Cooper to find new jobs — sometimes after pandemic-related layoffs, which they’re comfortable sharing with their inner circle but don’t want to broadcast to the world at large.

“There’s more discovery, more trust and you can reinvent other things on top of that — what the résumé is, what mentorship is — if you get trust right first,” he said.

Of course, simply sharing a calendar invite with someone doesn’t really mean you trust them or know them well. Cooper could eventually start looking at other measures that indicate your “connectivity” with someone, like how often you email with them, Gaal said — but the first step is simply recreating the professional circle in which you feel comfortable saying, “Oh, you’re looking for a job? My friend is hiring.”

Yes, those kinds of conversations are already happening offline, but he noted that most of us can only remember “a handful of people” at once. Cooper is making that “marketplace” much more visible and easy to track.

The startup doesn’t sell ads or user data. Instead, Gaal hopes to make money by charging membership fees for features like customizing your profile or promoting your request more broadly.

The startup’s seed funding was led by Comcast Ventures, with participation from LocalGlobe and 468 Capital.

“At a time when the ability to connect is limited, Cooper is building a professional network fostering meaningful and substantive connections, “said Daniel Gulati, founding partner at Forecast Fund and former managing director at Comcast Ventures, in a statement. “We are excited to support the team on their journey ahead.”

Telkomsel, Indonesia’s biggest telecom network, has invested $150 million in ride-hailing firm GoJek, the two companies said on Tuesday.

As part of the “strategic partnership,” the two firms said they will explore a “broad range of collaboration opportunities” to reach millions of Indonesians. Since 2018, GoJek and Telkomsel have maintained a deal to subsidize the cost of mobile data consumed by the ride-hailing firm’s driver partners.

With over 170 million subscribers, Telkomsel is the largest telecom operator in Indonesia. In addition to ride-hailing, GoJek has expanded to several additional businesses including digital payments and food delivery in Indonesia. The firm, which has raised over $3 billion to date and was valued at about $10 billion earlier this year, is backed by some of the biggest names in tech including Facebook, Google, PayPal, and Tencent. GoJek, which also serves about 170 million customers, competes with just as heavily backed firm Grab.

“This is a great day for Gojek and for Indonesia, as we strengthen our collaboration with Telkomsel, one of Indonesia’s most forward-looking telecommunication companies. By working together, we hope to help Indonesia become a true digital powerhouse in Southeast Asia, and bring the benefits of the digital economy to millions more consumers, driver-partners and small businesses,” Gojek co-chief executive Andre Soelistyo said in a statement.

More to follow…

PingCAP, the open-source software developer best known for NewSQL database TiDB, has raised a $270 million Series D. TiDB handles hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP), and is aimed at high-growth companies, including payment and e-commerce services, that need to handle increasingly large amounts of data.

The round’s lead investors were GGV Capital, Access Technology Ventures, Anatole Investment, Jeneration Capital and 5Y Capital (formerly known as Morningside Venture Capital). It also included participation from Coatue, Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund, FutureX Capital, Kunlun Capital, Trustbridge Partners, and returning investors Matrix Partners China and Yunqi Partners.

The funding brings PingCAP’s total raised so far to $341.6 million. Its last round, a Series C of $50 million, was announced back in September 2018.

PingCAP says TiDB has been adopted by about 1,500 companies across the world. Some examples include Square; Japanese mobile payments company PayPay; e-commerce app Shopee; video-sharing platform Dailymotion; and ticketing platfrom BookMyShow. TiDB handles online transactional processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) in the same database, which PingCAP says results in faster real-time analytics than other distributed databases.

In June, PingCAP launched TiDB Cloud, which it describes as fully-managed “TiDB as a Service,” on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The company plans to add more platforms, and part of the funding will be used to increase TiDB Cloud’s global user base.

Tibber, a ‘digital electricity’ supplier which uses AI to switch around power for houses based on their predicted levels of consumption – has closed a $65 million Series B round led by Eight Roads Ventures and Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors including San Francisco-based Founders Fund, which invested last year. Alongside equity, Tibber secured working capital funding by Nordea to support the high pace of growth.

You probably have one electricity supplier for your house. But these days the average household could probably buy from several such companies; it just can’t easily access the marketplace of possible suppliers. Wouldn’t it be smarter if you had an AI in your house that could purchase energy from these producers, including those within the local grid, at the best prices and at the best time of day? This is what Tibber does. It also does it to within 3 hours of your predicted usage.

The funding will support further investments into Tibber’s pioneering technology, scaling up the team, and expanding into new markets, the next one being the Netherlands in 2021.

Tibber CEO Edgeir Vårdal Aksnes said in a statement: “For us, this means that we can continue our mission of making energy smarter at an even faster pace. Our app has quickly become popular, and it has contributed to smart and green energy at lower prices. Our idea is to empower consumers to one day become independent from the electric grid and slow-moving monopolies.”

Since Tibber launched in 2016, it has seen organic growth to 100,000 paying households in Norway, Sweden and Germany. The company was founded in 2016 by Norwegian Edgeir Vårdal Aksnes and Swedish Daniel Lindén who were frustrated by the poor customer experience provided by traditional energy companies.

Alston Zecha from Eight Roads Ventures said: “Our team has been following the energy industry for years, and immediately recognized that Tibber is a game-changer. With market-leading technological capabilities, an innovative business model, and extremely positive customer reviews, Tibber delivers green energy at the fairest price.”

James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital, said: “Changing our behavior, and in particular, the way we consume energy at home is one of the biggest challenges we face in combating climate change. Tibber brings greater transparency to home energy usage while giving users a simple way to switch to renewable energy providers and control their home devices. It’s like a Fitbit for your home, but one which can put it on a healthy energy diet too.”

Tibber replaces traditional utilities with smart technology, supplying its customers with renewable energy at transparent prices. In addition, its app provides real-time analytics into energy usage, and pairs with a variety of smart home devices to reduce electricity consumption at home. Tibber has set a target to reduce the residential electricity consumption for European households by 20%.

AMP Robotics, the manufacturer of robotic recycling systems, has received its largest purchase order from the publicly traded North American waste handling company, Waste Connections.

The order, for 24 machine learning enabled robotic recycling systems, will be used on container, fiber and residue lines across numerous materials recovery facilities, the company said.

The AMP technology can be used to recover plastics, cardboard, paper, cans, cartons and many other containers and packaging types reclaimed for raw material processing.

The tech can tell the difference between high-density polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate, low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene. The robots can also sort for color, clarity, opacity and shapes like lids, tubs, clamshells, and cups — the robots can even identify the brands on packaging.

So far, AMP’s robots have been deployed in North America, Asia, and Europe with recent installations in Spain, and across the US in California, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

In January, before the pandemic began, AMP Robotics worked with its investor, Sidewalk Labs on a pilot program that would provide residents of a single apartment building representing 250 units in Toronto with detailed information about their recycling habits.

Working with the building and a waste hauler, Sidewalk Labs  would transport the waste to a Canada Fibers material recovery facility where trash will be sorted by both Canada Fibers employees and AMP Robotics. Once the waste is categorized, sorted, and recorded Sidewalk will communicate with residents of the building about how they’re doing in their recycling efforts.

Sidewalk says that the tips will be communicated through email, an online portal, and signage throughout the building every two weeks over a three-month period.

For residents, it was an opportunity to have a better handle on what they can and can’t recycle and Sidewalk Labs is betting that the information will help residents improve their habits. And for folks who don’t want their trash to be monitored and sorted, they could opt out of the program.

Recyclers like Waste Connections should welcome the commercialization of robots tackling industry problems. Their once-stable business has been turned on its head by trade wars and low unemployment. About two years ago, China decided it would no longer serve as the world’s garbage dump and put strict standards in place for the kinds of raw materials it would be willing to receive from other countries. The result has been higher costs at recycling facilities, which actually are now required to sort their garbage more effectively.

At the same time, low unemployment rates are putting the squeeze on labor availability at facilities where humans are basically required to hand-sort garbage into recyclable materials and trash.

AMP Robotics is backed by Sequoia Capital,  BV, Closed Loop Partners, Congruent Ventures  and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, a spin-out from Alphabet that invests in technologies and new infrastructure projects.