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Lululemon backs nylon recycling startup Syntetica in $30M Series A
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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, but also 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 Centre 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 second-hand e-commerce, Bertone is the business guy at Syntetica. But through Entrepreneur 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 also hired a CTO, Ash Ward, who previously worked for failed battery company Northvolt, whose cofounder Peter Carlsson is also one of Syntetica’s advisors. For Bertone, their scars and first-hand 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 20
Indian AI coding startup Emergent has raised $130 million in a Series C funding round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, a five-fold jump in six months. The funding round was led by private equity firm Creaegis. New investors MNI Ventures-Claypond, Sentinel Global, and existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator also participated. The deal takes Emergent’s total funding to $230 million. The startup had previously raised a $70 million Series B at a $300 million valuation in January. AI coding has attracted hordes of investors, with startups such as Lovable, Replit, and Cursor raising billions in funding to develop tools that allow developers to speed up their work. AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic have also pushed deeper into coding. Emergent is looking to gain a share of this crowded market by targeting entrepreneurs looking to start new businesses and small and medium-sized companies that have traditionally relied on email, spreadsheets and messaging apps to run their operations. “Our thesis has always been to build a production-grade application for serious builders,” Emergent co-founder and chief executive Mukund Jha (pictured above, right) told TechCrunch in an interview. “So you’re basically getting an engineering team in a box.” Jha said the startup has reached an annual run-rate revenue of $120 million, up 70% in the last four months, and has more than 200,000 paying customers. Jha started Emergent with his brother Madhav Jha (CTO) in June last year. Customers include trucking companies building software to track shipments; factories; construction businesses creating enterprise resource planning systems; and property managers developing internal customer management tools. North American customers account for about a third of Emergent’s revenue, Europe makes up another third, and the rest comes from other markets, Jha told TechCrunch. India accounts for about 8% to 9%. Emergent’s focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs pits it directly against Replit, which Jha described as the startup’s closest rival. He sought to distinguish Emergent from developer-focused coding tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor, arguing that non-technical users need a platform that handles deployment, hosting, testing, and debugging alongside the work of programming. However, Jha acknowledged that design remains a weakness, pointing out that many websites built using AI tools tend to look similar. Emergent plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate product development and research, including improving the success rate of applications built on its platform and its core AI agent workflows. The company is working to support more complex AI applications, including those that use local and open-source models, Jha said, adding that it will also invest in expanding its go-to-market operations. The company is also considering opening an office in Europe, where Jha said Emergent is seeing significant customer traction. Emergent has about 200 employees, most of whom work in Bengaluru, with a handful in San Francisco. The startup plans to expand its San Francisco office by 30 to 40 people by the end of the year, Jha said. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Jagmeet covers startups, tech policy-related updates, and all other major tech-centric developments from India for TechCrunch. He previously worked as a principal correspondent at NDTV. You can contact or verify outreach from Jagmeet by emailing mail@journalistjagmeet.com. View Bio
Physical badges used to be all you needed for identity management at a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even the identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate. That’s the gap Israeli startup Oak is stepping out of stealth to fill, it says. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has been quietly building a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization, and is now emerging publicly with its product generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients, backed by $60 million in seed funding that it raised late last year. The company didn’t disclose client names, but said its solution is already generally available and deployed by enterprise clients. Outdated credentials and poor identity access management — or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data — are a common security vulnerability, one that AI is expected to make even easier for attackers to exploit. Oak also calls itself AI-native, positioning itself as a replacement for legacy tools that were already showing their limits but had no consolidated alternative. According to Oak’s other co-founder, chief product officer Tal Marom, the startup spent months talking to 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before building its product: an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than only during periodic reviews. “Right now, the whole process is too manual, and it’s operations-based, not risk-based — for instance, there’s no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,” said Morag, a former army major who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity. During that time, he had three exits, including selling cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018. This track record helped Oak raise what is a very big round by local standards, one that matches its plans to invest heavily in R&D and growth, Morag said. “Our vision is to be born as a giant,” he told TechCrunch. Morag’s résumé already includes a stint at a giant organization. After public cyber company Tenable acquired his cloud identity and security startup Ermetic for $265 million in 2023, he stayed on as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran became ill and passed away, Morag left and told his wife he’d retire. Instead of stepping back, though, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team lead he’d met at Tenable who’d previously held similar roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a team of 50 people and are actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where a majority of Oak’s staff will soon be based, Morag said. Oak’s $60 million round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors. Morag told TechCrunch that VC interest was strong from the outset. Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Morag’s track record alone was a strong argument. Accel had led Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue; when Tenable acquired it, Accel gave Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next, Brasoveanu said. “I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.” With AI as “a democratizing force,” Accel has been backing founders right out of high school, Brasoveanu said. But when it comes to identity management, experience still counts. “There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organizations you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,” he said. Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect Oak will face plenty of competitors trying to use AI as a catalyst for change in a space where vendor lock-in runs deep. That makes it critical for Oak to scale fast. Morag, who’s told his wife this will be his last company, says he won’t retire until he’s given it everything he’s got:
DeductiveAI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, has agreed to be sold to enterprise software company Elastic for up to $85 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Deductive, which was founded in 2023, came out stealth last November when it announced a $7.5 million seed round led by CRV with participation from Databricks Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, and PrimeSet. The investment valued the startup at $33 million, according to PitchBook. Elastic and Deductive did not respond to multiple requests for comment. TechCrunch will update this article if either company responds. The sale marks a speedy exit for Deductive, which is operating in a fast-growing sector known as AI site reliability engineering (AI SRE). Building AI-powered SRE tools has become an important area, driven by the massive influx of AI-written code. Replacing manual debugging with AI enables human SREs to shift focus from constantly fixing outages and other problems, to spending more time on helping with product development. The acquisition reflects a broader trend in which established tech incumbents are looking to buy AI-native startups to integrate agentic technologies into their existing product suites, the source told TechCrunch. Elastic, which went public in 2018, is best known for Elasticsearch, the search and analytics engine that helps organizations store, search, analyze, and monitor large amounts of data in near real time. The company’s observability software — essentially tools that let engineers monitor software systems and detect security threats — could benefit from Deductive’s tech. According to the source, integrating Deductive’s AI technology into Elastic will enhance its observability platform by giving customers tools to automatically monitor performance and resolve system failures in real-time. Deductive was co-founded by Rakesh Kothari, who was previously VP of engineering at Lightspeed-backed business analytics startup ThoughtSpot, and Sameer Agarwal, who formerly worked at Apache Software Foundation and Meta. Agrawal was one of the founding engineers at Databricks. While Deductive reached roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR,) according to the source, the startup’s growth lagged behind Resolve AI, one of the sectors’ perceived early winners. The two-year-old Resolve was co-founded by former Splunk executive Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal. Greylock and Lightspeed-backed startup was last valued at $1.5 billion when it raised a $40 million Series A extension in April. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation. You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal. View Bio
Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant that it plans to start testing in the next year, according to a memo viewed by The Information. This device would presumably build on the work of Limitless, an AI device startup that Meta acquired at the end of 2025. The startup made an AI pendant that users could attach to their shirt or wear as a necklace to record their conversations. At the time, Meta said the acquisition would allow it to “accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables.” Earlier AI wearables have failed to catch on with consumers — perhaps due to privacy concerns and tone-deaf marketing, or perhaps because they just weren’t that useful. But companies like OpenAI aren’t giving up. The memo also reportedly states that the company is planning to expand its lineup of AI glasses and launch a business subscription called Wearables for Work. With all these planned devices, Meta is apparently hoping to reverse the fortunes of its hardware-focused Reality Labs division, which lost $4 billion in the first quarter of this year. TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment. Topics
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