Activewear company Lululemon has invested in the $30 million Series A round raised by Syntetica, a French startup that developed a novel approach to recycling nylon, whose properties make it both too good to give up but hard to reuse.

Syntetica promises to recycle two types of nylon — Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6 — that can’t easily be sorted out from each other in the textile waste collected from consumers, its CEO, Marco Bertone, told TechCrunch.

With tons of clothing ending up in landfills each year, one key reason for the fashion industry to invest in more circularity is customer perception, especially for premium apparel brands. Startups like Syntetica also benefit from regulatory tailwinds and from recent price volatility that unusually affected nylon.

In the last six months, geopolitical turmoil in the oil industry has led to quarterly or weekly nylon price renegotiations, Bertone said. “It’s been a wake-up call to many brands that have been relying on petrol-sourced nylon and petrol-sourced synthetics for pricing and convenience, and which today have seen massive shocks to their system.”

According to Bertone, this is a good fit for Syntetica’s pragmatic approach. “We have built the company with the clarity that there’s no green premium. That if you want to scale real solutions for a sustainable world, it needs to be cost competitive, highly scalable, and you need to build partnerships from the very start.”

The startup’s partners include brands like Lululemon, as well as Victoria’s Secret and Etam, with a recycling project that could go to market early next year. Syntetica’s Series A was also backed by a large apparel manufacturer, MAS Holdings — “a recognition of how significant the problem has become,” Bertone said.

It is indeed quite unusual for a supply chain actor to invest in a player that hasn’t scaled yet. But before its Series A, Syntetica had already closed a partnership with Michelin’s Center for Sustainable Materials to establish a commercial demonstration facility in the industrial company’s French hometown, Clermont-Ferrand.

Unlike other startups in its field, Syntetica won’t produce textile itself, let alone a novel material. The product of its recycling process will be pellets, which can then be used by others to make yarn for the likes of MAS. “It’s a story of pragmatic industrial partnerships with the right players to get buy-in from the whole value chain,” Bertone said.

With a background in fashion and secondhand e-commerce, Bertone is the business guy at Syntetica. But through Entrepreneurs First’s matchmaking-style accelerator hosted at Paris campus Station F, he teamed up with chemistry researcher Louis Monsigny. The duo then cemented their collaboration in Reims, where they made use of AgroParisTech’s lab. 

Since then, they have hired a CTO, Ash Ward, who previously worked for failed battery company Northvolt, whose co-founder Peter Carlsson is also one of Syntetica’s advisers. For Bertone, their scars and firsthand experience with the ups and downs of scaling give them experience on when and where to take risks. 

“As a startup, we have to be comfortable taking more risks than industrials; otherwise, there would be no innovation. But there’s also a line — when you parallelize too many risks, then it can become complex,” he said. That’s also why Syntetica isn’t diversifying just yet. 

Although it could eventually recycle other materials or serve other industries, its focus is on using its funding to demonstrate its ability to produce hundreds of tons of pellets per year and deliver them to clients in the clothing supply chain. After that, Bertone said, “Syntetica will be building facilities around the world, close to waste sources and close to textile production.”

While it has global ambitions, the startup benefits from being based in France. Its Series A was led by the Ecotechnologies 2 fund managed by the Green Venture team at Bpifrance, France’s public investment bank as part of the France 2030 plan. It has also received support from the European Innovation Council (EIC) with equity and grants and via its acceleration program.

For these public backers, startups like Syntetica are part of a broader plan to strengthen Europe’s industrial capabilities while reducing reliance on fossil fuels. But the startup also hopes to generate returns and is backed by private investors, including EQT Ventures, SWEN Capital Partners, and family offices.

Syntetica has competitors, too — some using an enzymatic approach to “eat” plastics, as well as chemical giant BASF, which developed recycled nylon. Still, after attending industry events, Bertone hopes they will all grow. “If everyone were to scale to tens of factories, we still wouldn’t solve this problem,” he said. “Everyone needs to succeed for us to succeed as a society.”

Lululemon has also invested in other textiles recycling startups such as Epoch Biodesign and Samsara Eco.