RECOTECH Raises Series A Funding. Accelerating a Massive Circular Economy Under “Turning Great Consumers into Great Suppliers.”

Mercuria Supply Chain Fund led the round, joined by Kampo NEXT Partners, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho Capital, Hulic Startup, and Kyoto Capital Partners.

RECOTECH (headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Ei Nozaki), which operates the resource circulation data platform pool, has completed a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Mercuria Supply Chain Fund, managed by Mercuria Investment Co., Ltd., with participation from Kampo NEXT Partners, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho Capital, Hulic Startup, and Kyoto Capital Partners.

RECOTECH's mission is turning great consumers into great suppliers — building the systems that transform the used resources accumulating in cities into raw-material supply for industry. A number of large-scale projects that amount to building new social infrastructure are already underway, including pool's rollout across 1,200 sites in Yokohama. Building on this kind of city-scale implementation, we're accelerating both product development and hiring.

Our banner: turning great consumers into great suppliers.

We're working to transform what has long been treated as "waste" — the used resources generated daily in major cities — from something merely disposed of into something that can be supplied as raw material supporting industry. The key to implementation is designing resource circulation as a whole while solving the individual challenges that tend to sit isolated within each supply chain, through operations that actually work on the ground.

RECOTECH has been advancing city-scale implementation together with a wide range of stakeholders, including commercial facilities, municipalities, and businesses (deployment track record: Takashimaya, the City of Yokohama, and others). Going forward, we'll use this implementation as a springboard to accelerate product development and organizational growth.

Deployment case: Tamagawa Takashimaya S.C.

pool dashboard, image 1

pool dashboard, image 2

Comment from Our CEO

Ei Nozaki, Representative Director, RECOTECH

For this Series A round, we've been fortunate to be joined by partners who can strongly support us in building a circular society. I'm both delighted and humbled by that.
I believe healthy competition and genuine co-creation are both essential if we're to achieve economic growth and resource circulation at the same time.

We look at the entire supply chain starting from the waste collection point, and we build operating systems that work in the real world. We're aiming to build a platform that forms a circle rather than a one-way artery or a reverse-flow vein — an ecosystem in which everyone is both a supplier and a producer.

Beyond commercial facilities and manufacturing plants, we're now rolling out the pool system across large-scale, multi-site, and diverse locations in partnership with the City of Yokohama. We're also actively piloting adoption not only at waste discharge sites but among related stakeholders, and continuing to develop systems that provide real solutions — from addressing labor shortages on the ground to driving DX for cost reduction — across the resource circulation supply chain.

With this funding, we'll keep sharpening the pool solution on both the software and hardware side. Under "Turning great consumers into great suppliers," we'll keep pursuing a sustainable, massive resource business.

Comments from Our Investors

Mercuria Investment Co., Ltd.
Kohei Fujita, Head of Venture Investment Strategy / Shoichi Murakami, Associate

Mercuria Supply Chain Fund (MSCF) has invested in RECOTECH as lead investor.
Since the era of rapid economic growth, global supply chains built on mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal, incineration, and landfill have supported the world's economic growth — but they are now reaching a major turning point. Leading companies across industries are increasingly setting the share of recycled material use as a key KPI, and Japan, given its especially tight resource constraints, needs to push even further in this direction.
We concluded that RECOTECH, a startup tackling the structural challenges of the industrial waste industry by optimizing reverse-logistics supply chains starting from data, is highly aligned with MSCF's investment philosophy, and decided to invest.
Going forward, we'll work alongside MSCF's LP investors as a partner in building a sustainable future.

Kampo NEXT Partners Co., Ltd.
Takuji Suzuki, Partner

We believe the essential value of RECOTECH's pool lies not simply in visualizing resource circulation with data, but in restructuring the supply chain so that it makes economic sense for every player — waste generators, collectors, recyclers, and offtakers alike. We were especially impressed that RECOTECH has pushed from discharge data into logistics and transaction structures, refining the model through real-world operation. We hope pool's growth helps establish circular supply chains as a genuinely sustainable industry, and we'll continue to support the company's growth going forward.

Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co., Ltd.
Akira Yachiguchi, Senior Deputy General Manager, Investment Division I

By bringing visibility and efficiency to the resource circulation market, RECOTECH's pool is expected to develop into a platform that supports decarbonization and the stable securing of renewable resources. As global warming progresses, policies promoting the use of recycled materials are being strengthened around the world, and building a circular society has become a critical priority internationally. Against this backdrop, we expect RECOTECH to contribute meaningfully to solving challenges in the resource circulation space.

Mizuho Capital Co., Ltd.
Yuki Wakikado, General Manager, Investment Division IV

We at Mizuho Capital are delighted to support RECOTECH's growth through this investment.
RECOTECH's pool is a foundational system essential to realizing the circular economy, reconnecting with data a waste and resource circulation structure that has long been fragmented.
We also see great potential in the fact that major corporations and government bodies have already embraced the company's philosophy and are moving forward with concrete collaborations.
Together with the Mizuho group companies, we'll do everything we can to support the strong conviction and execution of Representative Director Nozaki, who has more than 25 years in the industry and knows the field and its challenges intimately enough to call himself a self-professed "waste geek."

Hulic Startup Co., Ltd.
Koki Sawada, Investment Manager

We deeply resonate with RECOTECH's mission of fulfilling our responsibility to future generations, and its vision of building a society capable of nature-positive economic development — which is why we joined this Series A round. We expect the real-world implementation of pool, which brings visibility to resource circulation, to be an important step toward realizing our own corporate philosophy of building a society full of security and trust. We'll sincerely support RECOTECH's business growth and work toward a circular society in which resources keep generating value.

Kyoto Capital Partners Co., Ltd.
Yoshiki Murata, Director

We're grateful for this opportunity to connect with RECOTECH. The circular economy grows more important by the day, and its market is expected to see significant growth. Against that backdrop, we highly value RECOTECH's social significance as, in effect, the core of the circular society — a company capable of turning consumption sites into supply sites — and we invested with high expectations for the growth of the company driving that shift. Going forward, we'll support RECOTECH by drawing on the full resources of the Kyoto Financial Group.

Careers

RECOTECH sees this funding as an investment in development and hiring aimed at driving discontinuous growth for our product and business. We're rapidly expanding our team, centered on engineering and business development, to accelerate real-world implementation.

What we're changing is the social infrastructure itself that keeps running behind the scenes of every city and business. The circular economy has become a critical matter of economic security. Creating the social infrastructure of the future in this field isn't easy, but at RECOTECH we take on a challenge that is both ambitious and grounded in reality: getting deep into real-world data and operations, and building implementation up from the connection points between regulation, business process, and supply chain.

What's more, our engineering team is entering its core team-building phase, offering a rare opportunity to lead from the ground up as a founding member of the foundation we're building.

We're looking for teammates to run at the frontier of the circular economy with us.
For more on our open roles, please see here.

Investors

Lead investor
Mercuria Investment

Participating investors
Kampo NEXT Partners, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho Capital, Hulic Startup, Kyoto Capital Partners

Company Overview

Company name: RECOTECH
Address: Resona Kudan Building 5F KS Floor, 1-5-6 Kudanminami, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Representative: Ei Nozaki, Representative Director
Founded: May 2007

URL:
Company: https://recotech.co.jp/
Service: https://pool.recotech.co.jp/
Business overview:
Next-generation weighing management system pool (for waste generators)
PCR material procurement platform pool (for offtakers)
100% domestic PCR material – pool resin
Circularity Design Consulting

[Media contact for this release]
RECOTECH, Contact: Omura
Email: info@recotech.co.jp