Today we interview Humara, one of our featured startups and recent winner of the Open Call for Waste Management Startups. We spoke with its co-founder and CEO, Laura Rodríguez.
What made your solution stand out among the more than 160 applications received from 50 countries for the Open Call for Waste Managements Startups?
We stood out because we are not coming from the outside to explain how waste is managed: we come from within the sector. My co-founder Martín and I spent more than a decade designing, building and operating some of the largest plants in Europe. Knowing the problem from the inside completely changes how we solve it, and how we explain it: as soon as an engineer sees their own materials, their own waste composition and their own numbers on screen, we are already speaking the same language.
And we are tackling a real problem. A forty-million-euro plant generates billions of data points every day — weighbridge readings, line sensors, consumption data, recovery rates, stoppages — which are either lost or not properly used. In 2026, the industry standard is still an Excel spreadsheet or, worse, a handwritten operations logbook. We have built the software layer this industry has never had: a single source of truth where everything is connected and where changing one variable is propagated across all the others. And it is already operating in six real plants in different countries. That combination — knowing the sector from the inside and bringing a product that is already operating, not a demo — is what resonated.
What learnings or connections do you take away from the final?
The confirmation that the problem is global. Sharing the final with startups from so many countries reminds you that waste management is a huge, shared challenge, and that what we are building has potential far beyond Europe. We take away contacts who look at the sector from different angles, and in a challenge like this, those angles add up much more than they compete. And we take away validation: when people who truly know this industry see what we do and connect with it, you know you are on the right track.
How do you expect to use this opportunity to continue developing your solution?
This opportunity gives us visibility and opens doors, and we translate that into one thing: more plants operating with Humara. Every plant we digitalise gives us data and learnings that feed back into the product. And that is where the technical key lies: our model learns to estimate what is not measured, so every new plant, every different composition and every level of instrumentation expands what the model is able to infer. The more real-world conditions it sees, the more useful it becomes.
And precisely for that reason, what excites us most right now is launching this operational pilot with Ecoembes. Starting with one plant, demonstrating value using its own data and its own numbers, and from there opening the path to scaling across its 97 treatment plants. The challenge is huge, and we could not be happier to tackle it together. That is the wheel we want to accelerate: more operators, in more countries, and a system that improves with every plant that joins.
What impact can your technology have on improving the sector?
The sector has an efficiency and knowledge problem that costs money and costs material. Our technology addresses it at the root, in both phases.
In design, we automate 80% of the engineering work and reduce its cost by up to 70%. And, above all, we eliminate uncertainty: today, decisions are made about forty-million-euro infrastructure that will operate for 25 years using calculations scattered across separate spreadsheets. We bring coherence: a single source of truth where, if the waste composition or a recovery rate changes, everything else is recalculated automatically.
In operation, measured in real plants against their own baseline, we achieve between 5% and 7% lower OpEx, higher material recovery, greater availability and less waste sent to landfill.
The impact is twofold: companies gain efficiency, and the planet benefits because more material is recovered and less is sent to landfill. And because the model works even in plants without connectivity, that impact is not limited to the most modern facilities: it can reach any plant in the world.
What are your next milestones as a startup?
In the short term, the focus is clear: to execute Humara Operate impeccably where it is already deployed and consolidate it with more operators. To continue growing with the major players we already work with and support them as they expand into new countries. And to move towards our vision: that in three to five years, no new plant in Europe is designed or operated without something like this, just as today no one designs a building without Autodesk or manages a factory without an MES. It is the vertical software layer for an industry that moves hundreds of billions and has operated without that standard until now. We are building it plant by plant: every well-executed plant is another building block.
What message would you like to share with other circular economy and waste startups?
To truly understand the problem they want to solve. In this sector, good technology is not enough: you need to understand how a plant works, what keeps an operator awake at night, where the money is and where the waste is. Technology is the tool; sector knowledge is what makes it useful.
And a second thing: we need to stop treating each other as competition. In impact, because there is less capital, there is a strange tendency to look sideways at those around you, even when they are solving a neighbouring problem. But we are all pushing against the same inertia: the status quo. We need more collaboration and to share the hard lessons without sugar-coating them. It is not a glamorous sector, but it is one of the most important challenges of the century, and there is still so much to build.
There is no time to lose.