Meet the sustainable fashion startup supported by H&M and Amazon

When Gilberto Lureiro spent the summer working in a textile factory as a teenager growing up in Portugal, he found that he was feeling “hatred and love” about how to produce clothes.

The job was difficult: Lureiro’s job was to spend long days standing and looking at the fabric of fabrics while passing through machines at a speed of about 15 to 20 meters per minute.

“I love the textile industry and solving problems, but I hate it … Checking work and inefficiency and waste. This is really one of the most difficult jobs in the world,” Lureiro told CNBC via a video call.

During the decade, since he took his first factory change, Lureiro’s thinking has shifted. After taking a master’s degree in physics, he co -founded Smartex, a technology company that uses cameras, vision software and artificial intelligence to detect defects in textiles during their production and therefore reduce the share of the fabric that is wasting. Lureiro claims the technology has prevents 1 million pounds of fabric from going to waste in the last three years.

Fashion has a big waste problem, with about a second being thrown and buried or burned or burned or burned or burned every second Ellen MacArta FoundationNon -profit purpose. Smartex claims that its defect technology means 0.37% more clothing can be produced per kilogram of ready-made fabric-which is added if you think the fashion giant Inditex (owner of ZARA) uses 678 596 tonnes of raw materials in its products in 2024, for its Annual reportS

On top of that, fashion is an industry that is yet to completely cover digitalization, said Lureiro, partly because it is considered difficult to do. The manufacture of clothing is complicated as supply chains can be long and fragmented, from growing and processing raw materials such as cotton, to weaving and painting textiles, designing patterns and sewing fabrics in clothes. At the same time this is fast moving and unpredictable Industry.

“If this is the largest industry that is still untouched by () the Internet and is one of the largest pollutants in the world and no one works on this in terms of technology (then) there is a huge gap here,” Lureiro said. About 20% of global water pollution is caused by painting and completion during the production of textiles, According to the EUS

This lack of technology in the production of clothing and the potential for the industry to become more efficient to make Smartex attractive to investors, Loureiro said. H&M Group Invest in Smartex in 2022 while Tony Fadel – inventor of iPod and nest thermostat – LED A 24.7 million dollars investment round With Lightspeed Venture Partners in the same year. According to Loureiro, Smartex has raised over $ 40 million, but given the complexity and operations of the industry in many countries, he said investors are “brave” to support it. “There is a huge value to shoot. So this is a great risk as a reward,” he added, given the size of the industry assessed as worth More than $ 1.8 trillion In 2025

Smartex and his high -ranking investors caught the eye of AmazonWho has also invested money into the company through its AWS Compute for Climate Fellowship, an initiative that supports technological launches in areas such as food security, climate conservation and resistance. Lisbeth Kaufman, the leader of the development of the air -conditioning business, startup companies and risk capital at AWS, launched the scholarship in 2023, with four companies winning a place in the program.

“The start -ups of climate technology, they have so many research and development (research and developments) that they have to do … maybe even more than … standard technology companies, they have to come up with a new science or new technology, as well as new business models,” Kaufman told CNBC via video conversation. Scholarship companies are accessing access to AWS experts as well as to modern computing services, and 20 companies will be selected to participate this year with a total investment of $ 4 million. Smartex uses AWS technology to train its machine learning models to identify fabric disadvantages that can vary greatly.

“If after 30 seconds he is not convinced of the return on the return on investment (return on investment), for less than one year, for example, you are out of the game … We must prove to them that they will save in materials, in yarn or in electricity,” Lureiro said. Most of the factory owners who register are spending a few hundred thousand dollars for Smartex. “We have to make sure that the savings are much, much more than costs,” Lureiro said. The average period of payment of an investment in Smartex is from nine to 18 months, according to Institute for Impact on ClothingS

The purpose of Smartex is to become an “operating system” for factories throughout the fashion chain so that brands can track information, such as where clothes come from, where they are in the production process and how much water is used to produce items. “These are the main questions that are very difficult or impossible to answer most fashion brands,” Lureiro said.

Fadel likened the potential of Smartex with AppleThe software ecosystem, Lureiro said. “It’s not about the computer, Mac or iPhone or AirPods, but about what they can all do together, it creates an ecosystem, a layer on top, which becomes much more price.”