Founder Profile: Sarika Bajaj and Tushita Gupta | Refiberd
In this interview, the founders of Refiberd, Sarika Bajaj and Tushita Gupta, share their journey from engineering backgrounds to tackling the global crisis of textile waste. After meeting at Carnegie Mellon, where they both earned their degrees, the two launched Refiberd in 2020 to develop innovative solutions for textile recycling, winning recognition such as the H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award. Outside of work, they are passionate about exploring the intersection of AI, fashion, and technology while advocating for sustainable consumption.
This story has been lightly edited for clarity.
Who: Sarika Bajaj & Tushita Gupta
Location: San Francisco, CA
Company: Refiberd
Stage: Seed
One-liner: AI driven clothing recycling
Thesis: Climate | Circular Economy
About: Refiberd is reimagining how we handle textile waste. Currently, over 92M tons of textiles are discarded annually (this number is projected to double by 2030!), with only 1% recycled. The company’s technology leverages AI to identify textile composition so that it can be recycled into new thread, enabling customers and clients to incorporate and benefit from cost-effective and sustainable textile alternatives.
Introduce yourself!
We founded Refiberd in 2020, with the goal of using our engineering backgrounds to help solve the massive global crisis of textile waste. Over the past four years, we’ve had the chance to see our vision grow and have our solution begin to impact the industry, winning recognition like H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award in 2023. Before Refiberd, Tushita previously worked at Atomwise, where she developed AI-driven drug discovery solutions; Sarika previously worked at SRI International, where she worked on how to bring SRI’s largely government-backed R&D efforts to different industry sectors. We both completed our Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees at Carnegie Mellon, where we initially met in freshman year.
Why did you start the company?
Sarika: My first internship was in Intel’s R&D team, where I had the chance to work on fashion x tech integration projects, such as an electronic dress that was featured on a Netflix show. From that first experience, I continued to pursue research in textile engineering at CMU, specifically on the industry movement towards textile circularity in my Masters’ program. It was this research that initially got the two of us interested in the major gap in textile circularity — being able to properly sort textile waste by material to enter recycling streams. From our backgrounds and previous work, we knew that this sorting challenge would be fundamental and difficult to solve well, but could be solved using sensor processing and AI techniques.
What’s your biggest piece of advice for other founders?
Tushita: One of the hardest challenges as a founder is to figure out whose advice to listen to; remember to balance and contextualize every tidbit, as not everyone has the same lens to the problem as you do.
Tell us more about the current state of textile waste. How did it get so bad?
Every year about 186 billion pounds of textile waste is being generated each year, of which about 85% is being directly landfilled or incinerated. The problem began with the industrial revolution, which enabled the world to produce textiles at a much faster rate than before (textiles take a notoriously long time to produce manually). This massive global change caused the price of textiles to drop, which initially was a wonderful thing, as more textiles were now available across different levels of society and not just reserved for the upper classes. However, since the 1800s, the demand for textiles has continued to rise to the point of overconsumption, especially with the rise of fast fashion, and production became cheaper than ever to meet the demand. However, the end-of-life was never truly considered in this process, and the amount of waste produced by the industry has continued to grow. It is projected to continue to double in the next 10 years!
Did you two get exposed to entrepreneurship while in school? If so, how important was that to your journey to starting a company?
Sarika: We both had the chance to explore entrepreneurship at school, and actually Carnegie Mellon was the first check into Refiberd through the VentureBridge program. Having that existing network and support system was tremendous for us to learn the basics of how to actually start a start-up, and one of our professors is still on our team as our lawyer today.
What can consumers do to contribute to the fight against climate change?
Reduce your consumption. The biggest impact by far is to simply buy less clothes, extend the lifespan of your existing clothes, and buy / support second-hand retailers to extend the value of clothes already manufactured. Also, online returns rarely get resold.
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