Today, we introduce Metaspectral together with its co-founder and CEO, Francis Doumet. Metaspectral’s main focus is applying AI-powered spectral imaging to identify, characterize, and sort complex materials that conventional recycling technologies struggle to recover.
What problem does your startup address and what solution does it propose?
Metaspectral addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks in recycling: the inability to reliably identify and sort complex materials at industrial speed. Many valuable materials, including thin film, black plastics, multilayer packaging, polymer blends, and materials with additives or contamination, are difficult or impossible for conventional optical sorting systems to distinguish. As a result, they are often downcycled, rejected, or sent to landfill. Metaspectral’s solution combines next-generation sensing and patented AI architectures to detect hidden material signatures that are invisible to standard cameras. Its technology can identify, differentiate, and ultimately sort complex packaging and other hard-to-recycle materials in real time, improving recovery rates, material purity, and the economics of recycling.
How and why did you start this entrepreneurial adventure? Is there any advice from your experience that you would like to share with future entrepreneurs?
Metaspectral began with the conviction that the physical world contains much more information than conventional cameras can capture. Ultra-high-definition infrared imaging can reveal the chemical and material composition of objects, but historically it has been too complex, expensive, and difficult to deploy at scale. Metaspectral was founded to make this capability practical, automated, and useful in real industrial environments. The advice we would share with future entrepreneurs is to stay very close to the customer’s real operational pain points. Advanced technology is only valuable when it solves a problem that matters economically and environmentally. In recycling, that means not only building accurate AI models, but also understanding line speeds, contamination, equipment integration, maintenance, and the business case for recovering more valuable material.
How do you expect the sector to evolve? And what expectations do you have for your startup?
We expect the recycling sector to become much more data-driven and automated. New regulations, especially around minimum recycled content and producer responsibility, will increase demand for cleaner material streams and better traceability. At the same time, recyclers will need technologies that can recover materials that current systems miss, particularly flexible plastics, multilayer packaging, black plastics, and automotive shredder residue plastics. Metaspectral expects to play a role as a material intelligence layer for this next generation of recycling infrastructure. The company’s goal is to help recyclers and equipment manufacturers identify more materials, recover higher-value streams, and provide the data needed to improve packaging design and circularity.
Are there any upcoming developments in the near future that you would like to share with the rest of the startups?
Metaspectral is entering an important commercialization phase. The company recently concluded a partnership with German equipment manufacturer Sicon and is working to bring its AI-powered material identification technology into industrial recycling applications. It was also recently awarded a contract by the Canadian Ministry of the Environment to deliver technology for sorting multilayered plastic film. In the near future, Metaspectral is focusing on flexible plastics and automotive shredder residue plastics, two areas where better sorting can unlock significant environmental and economic value. The company is also raising a new financing round to build its sales and business development team and accelerate commercial deployment.
In what areas would you like to collaborate with other startups, companies, or other organisations?
Metaspectral is interested in collaborating with recyclers, sorting facility operators, packaging producers, brands, research organisations, and equipment manufacturers. In particular, the company is looking for partners with access to challenging material streams, such as flexible packaging, multilayer materials, black plastics, polymer blends, and automotive shredder residue. Metaspectral is also seeking additional hardware and equipment partners that want to integrate advanced AI-based material identification into their sorting systems. Over the long term, Metaspectral intends to focus primarily on its AI software and material intelligence capabilities, while working with industrial partners that can help deploy the technology at scale.
You were selected as a finalist in the Open Call for Waste Management Startups, which received more than 160 applications from over 50 countries. Could you tell us about your experience with the call?
Being selected as a finalist was a strong validation of Metaspectral’s technology and its relevance to global waste management challenges. The call brought together a highly international group of startups working on different parts of the circular economy, which made the experience especially valuable. For Metaspectral, the process helped sharpen the company’s focus on the most urgent recycling challenges: recovering materials that are currently missed, improving sorting economics, and generating better data for packaging circularity. It also created an opportunity to connect with potential partners, customers, and organisations that share the goal of building more intelligent and scalable recycling infrastructure.