- Ambio has raised € 5.1 million in a seed round, led by b2venture, with Lifeline Ventures and Montis also participating.
- The rival marketplace, Cirplus, entered liquidation in March, while Ambio deals directly in recycled plastic.
- Ambio began operating in France two weeks ago, after first launching in the Nordic countries and Germany.
Ambio, a Helsinki-based AI-native procurement service for recycled plastics that handles everything from sourcing materials to arranging long-term delivery, just raised €5.1 million. b2venture led the round, with participation from Montis and existing investor Lifeline Ventures.
The funds will help the startup expand internationally and diversify the types of polymer it uses. According to its co-founder and CEO Tommi Bergström, increasing the use of recycled plastics will enable the EU to depend less on imported fossil feedstock.
A former BCG consultant transitions to recycled plastics
Bergström had not been in the plastics industry at the beginning of his career. He joined Slush in the summer of 2019, bringing Elmo Pakkanen, now Ambio’s chief operating officer, into the research and strategy team.
Before that, Bergström worked at the Boston Consulting Group’s Helsinki office from June 2021 to January 2023, focusing on materials, the process industries, climate, and sustainability. Pakkanen remained with Slush. In January 2022, Bergström said they had decided to become founders within a year.
The concept for Ambio arose in late 2022, when Bergström’s experience in the materials and process industries coincided with Pakkanen’s research into B2B trading marketplaces, and they then founded Ambio in February 2023.
“As early as 2023 we recognised that the recycled plastics market was flawed, that the supply side was fragmented. There are numerous quality problems, inefficiencies in pricing, and no effective means by which the parties involved in the market can trade in a scalable and reliable manner,” Bergström tells Tech Funding News.
Ambio operates as a principal
The platform’s operations are similar to a matchmaking process.
Buyers inform Ambio of the type of polymer they require, along with its specifications, the quantity needed, and the desired delivery date. Ambio then matches these requests with qualified suppliers and handles the logistics.
According to Bergström, supplier vetting begins with inspections of the recycling process, which can be carried out in person or online. Ambio compares suppliers’ technical data sheets with certificates of analysis from previous batches and may send samples to a third-party laboratory. Buyers receive samples weighing between a few hundred grams and up to 25 kilograms to test on their production lines.
Ambio has worked with its customers for three and a half years, mostly in construction and packaging. Bergström added that Ambio now provides services to customers in the Nordic countries and in Germany, and that it began operating in France over the past two weeks. He stated that the next aim is to enter more European markets.
Speaking about rivalry, Bergström said, “our greatest competition is the status quo,” referring to customers who continue to use virgin plastic produced from oil. He also cited existing traders and distributors as competitors.
Buyers are shifting away from recycled plastic
Most venture capital money has gone to the supply side. We have previously reported on €15.5 million for a PET recycling plant, £9 million for Epoch Biodesign’s biorecycling of nylon 6.6, and $30 million for Syntetica’s nylon recycling. Ambio, by contrast, concentrates on the demand side, since demand there remains weak.
According to S&P Global, the group expected nearly one million tonnes of capacity to be lost between 2023 and the end of 2025, out of a total of 13.2 million tonnes from about 850 plants. The decline was attributed to cheap imports, regulatory barriers, and a widening price gap, which caused buyers to choose virgin material.
The regulation aims to eliminate this gap. Bergström tells TFN that these rules will generate “a lot of demand” for standardised, predictable quality and that Ambio will help companies select the appropriate materials. Yet he does not believe that regulation on its own will be sufficient,
Mathias Ockenfels, a venture partner at b2venture, said, “We are backing Ambio not only because of the talented team led by Tommi and Elmo but also because of the compounding competitive moat the business is built on: a proprietary dataset on recyclate quality, a principal model that builds trust with buyers and sellers, and an agentic engine that turns every transaction and quality data point into improved matchmaking.”
The global recycled plastics market is expected to increase from $69.4B in 2023 to $120.0B by 2030, representing an 8.1% CAGR; this forecast, issued in April 2023, preceded the recent market closures.
Bergström states that the industry suffers from a lack of trust. Ambio now has to show that direct sales can work, and repeat orders will prove its success.
