Somewhere in almost every household, there’s a box of forgotten LEGO: missing pieces, half-built sets, and a mess of colours that no one quite has the patience to sort. A Lithuanian startup, Sort A Brick, brings billions of neglected toy-building bricks back to life, using AI-powered computer vision and sorting technology.
Founded in 2022 by Ilya Malkin and Aurimas Slapšys, the Vilnius-based company has built a machine that can recognise, sort, and organise used LEGO bricks automatically. This launch comes as the company aims to raise €3 million in its next seed round to scale up its operations.
“We are seeing faster growth in the market for used toys, as families want options that balance affordability, quality, and a personal connection to what they already own. We estimate that the secondary LEGO market has outpaced retail for the past five years, reaching around €1 billion in 2024.
Still, only a small fraction of LEGO bricks re-enter the resale market, with the majority confined to fan communities. With the right technology and services, we can unlock massive untapped demand for quality used sets in the mainstream market,” says Malkin.
A conveyor that recognises and sorts LEGO bricks automatically
Sort A Brick’s system uses computer vision trained on tens of thousands of LEGO pieces to tell one brick from another, even those that look nearly identical. It can spot a missing corner, match colours precisely, and recognise which set a pile of bricks originally came from.
Once everything’s scanned, the machine sorts the pieces into new, buildable sets or flags, indicating which parts are missing. What would take a human collector several days can be done in about an hour. The startup claims its system can recognise over 25,000 parts and match them to more than 10,000 LEGO sets with 99% accuracy.
“The conveyor we’ve built is the first of its kind: an industrial-grade machine with exceptionally high accuracy that can process around 1,000 parts per hour,” Malkiin.
Once the pieces are logged, the system automatically sorts and groups them into buildable sets, flagging which parts are missing and even suggesting replacements. If some bricks are missing, they will be added to make the set assembly-ready.
According to Malkin, the new conveyor can process up to three times the volume per hour while requiring less than a tenth of the human labour.
Sort A Brick’s main competition comes from community marketplaces like BrickLink and Brick Owl, which rely heavily on manual sorting. What sets the Lithuanian startup apart is automation and speed. Its system can handle industrial-scale volumes, turning mixed piles into “ready-to-build” sets at a pace humans can’t match.
So far, the company has received around 5,000 kilograms of bricks from 16 countries from collectors and families.
What’s next?
The startup is now raising €3 million in seed funding to build two pilot sorting centres in Western Europe and expand production. The team also plans to license the technology to toy recyclers and marketplaces, and eventually move beyond LEGO to other modular toy systems.
Makin told TFN exclusively, “I believe we’re only at the start of unlocking what technology can do for circularity in consumer products. Right now, most of the focus on reused toys is still on basic cleaning and bulk resale, but that only touches the surface. We are showing what’s possible when you design solid, reliable hardware: building machinery that can bring millions of goods from back closets and attics into active use.
Over time, more entrepreneurs will recognise the potential in solutions like this, and we’ll start to see new approaches to repurposing products at scale, not just in toys, but across other categories, making reuse practical for everyone.”
