Berlin's reverse.fashion Scores HTGF Backing

Berlin-based startup reverse.fashion just landed a seven-figure top-up to its pre-seed round from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), according to a press release from the fund. The fresh money is earmarked for one job: getting the company's AI-powered sorting technology into commercial use across the textile industry.

The problem reverse.fashion is chasing is a stubborn one. Turning old clothes into a real circular economy depends on sorting them accurately and fast, and manual sorting has hit its limits on both cost and capacity. reverse.fashion's answer is an AI system that scans used garments and sorts them by condition, style, brand, size, and material, so they end up either back on the resale rack or in high quality recycling instead of the landfill.

Co-founder Dr. Karsten Pufahl says the tech already shows real results in pilots: customers see productivity climb by 40 percent and revenue rise by around 20 percent.

With pilots of the software co.sort running well, reverse.fashion is now pushing the launch of its full solution, line.sort, aiming to make automated sorting standard practice across the industry. 

HTGF's Dr. Anne Umbach points to tightening rules like EPR and EU mandates as a driver behind the shift, and says the fund is glad to back a team tackling such a central bottleneck in the industry.

Founded in 2024 as a TU Berlin spin-off building on joint research with Freie Universität Berlin and circular.fashion GmbH, reverse.fashion now employs 12 people.