Meet Charles Yhap and Tanner Cook, Co-Founders of CleanRobotics
Invest in startups like Clean Robotics alongside Climate Capital here.
Founders: Charles Yhap & Tanner Cook
Motto or mission: We seek to create and implement innovative technological solutions to persistent environmental problems in a sustainable way. Our flagship product, TrashBot, identifies and sorts waste as it is thrown away, ensuring all recyclables and other recoverable materials are diverted from landfills.
Year founded: 2015
Stage: Completed Series A funding, planning for Series B
Location: Longmont, Colorado
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Climate Capital: How did you get into Climate?
CleanRobotics: CleanRobotics was born out of frustration over complex recycling rules and a fragmented system where very little is recycled. We decided to combat ineffective recycling by developing waste sorting technology that simplifies recycling at the source while enhancing education and the user experience.
Climate Capital: Frame the problem you are solving and the market
CleanRobotics: Recycling is hard. Rules change from place to place, new regulations are frequently introduced, and people are confused. Waste management remains the one process that corporations cannot measure or qualify. The burden of recycling is placed on individuals, and it is hard for busy people to get educated and keep up with the changing regulations.
Our biggest competitor is the incumbent multi-stream bins that have been around for over 40 years. But the public is only 30% accurate when it comes to picking the right bin due to location-specific recycling rules and a lack of recycling education. Most, if not all, recyclables collected via this conventional method are too contaminated to be recycled and end up in landfills. All of our current customers - despite their size - were encountering this issue.
When evaluating the smart bin market, CleanRobotics is differentiated by a patent on robotic waste stations. This means we are the only solution capable of completely automating sorting at the point of disposal. Our closest competitors only sort recyclables, leaving users to figure out where their trash and compost items should go, or they use cameras to direct users to the proper bin but lack the reliability and consistency of TrashBot.
Unlike other companies, we also provide an unparalleled analytics platform with specific educational and operational insights.
Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?
CleanRobotics: We want recycling to be simple and engaging for visitors and staff while consistent and reliable for the facility with better business intelligence. The impact will be improved diversion, operational efficiency, education, and overall disposal experience for everyone.
Climate Capital: What is your potential impact?
CleanRobotics: Based on data we collected from TrashBot pilot studies, we've determined that through better sorting and enhanced recycling education campaigns, CleanRobotics over 10 years will:
Divert 8.2M tons of recyclables
Abate 23.8M tons of carbon
TrashBot's impact directly correlates to the amount of waste generated. Ultimately, we aim to deploy tens of thousands of TrashBots in high-traffic facilities across the United States.
Climate Capital: What is next?
CleanRobotics: By the end of 2023, we intend to have the capability to scale up production of TrashBot units. We’re working on expanding our commercialization of TrashBot while reducing the cost per unit, which should drive further market adoption. Another project we’re excited about is adding interactive content to TrashBot, which will be delivered on TrashBot’s screen and engage and educate users, improving the overall disposal experience.
Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?
CleanRobotics: There are challenges in building a culture in a post-COVID world, with 99% of people working remotely and a distributed team that includes different generations. The cornerstone of our culture is our values: Respect, Integrity, Passion, Remarkable Service, Teamwork, Sustainability, and Partner Mentality. Because our mission is to create and implement innovative technological solutions to persistent environmental problems in a sustainable way, we actively recruit folks inclined toward sustainability. Beyond that, we work to align everyone in the company around our values.
Especially with remote work, it’s important to keep everyone mentally sane, so we implement a company structure that includes things to make work life better. We have a trivia game every day on Slack, and we operate on a slightly reduced work week, offering Flex Fridays. Flex Fridays give us an opportunity to play games and connect as a team, wrap up the week, and then take a half day off. We also set a cadence of meetings that connect everyone inter-departmentally and rally us around shared goals.
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?
CleanRobotics: With commercialization, the challenge has been transferring our understanding of the customer to complex organizations, how they make decisions, their stakeholders, and how we can best present our solution to them.
Educating users on what to expect from the technology can also be difficult. User recycling education is always a work in progress. With our new interactive content, we intend to put a lot more emphasis on the education component of TrashBot.
Another key challenge is to reduce the cost per unit and offer TrashBot at a reasonable price to the marketplace. Our technology is expensive to create for each unit, so we’d like to be able to build more units to be sold at lower rates.
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?
CleanRobotics: I’ve learned the importance of striking a balance between trusting yourself and your process and having a healthy skepticism for assumptions and biases. Founders should figure out a transparent way to hedge against failures, logic, and hidden biases. There are a lot of things that can creep up if you’re not attentive to them, and they can impact your ability to make good decisions.
I’ve also learned the value of having people around you who are willing to be honest with you and creating an environment where it’s okay for your people to be straight with you without fear.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?
CleanRobotics: Sales and investment in innovative technologies like ours would be the biggest thing impacting what we do. If you know of any potential customers that can benefit from what we’re building, please point them in our direction. Likewise with investors with an affinity to what we’re building. In a broader sense, more investment in smaller companies like CleanRobotics will also help tip the policy environment in our favor.
We also need a push for greater corporate transparency around climate emissions and a waste management market that will allow regulation to be implemented and enforced, buoyed by the technology and what it is capable of achieving. And on a policy level, we need to push our legislators to give innovative startups and tech founders a seat at the table when crafting policy. If there is popular support for bringing the startup community together with lawmakers, we can fix a lot of problems, and the economic and environmental benefits would be enormous.