Robots to the Recycling Rescue: Matanya Horowitz Is Ensuring Your Recyclables Are Actually Recycled
Release Date: 07/15/2022
The Past, Present, and Future of Cultivated Meat with UPSIDE Foods’ Uma Valeti
Business for Good Podcast
No cultivated meat company has raised more capital than UPSIDE Foods. In 2022, after having already raised about $200 million in previous rounds, the company raised another with a company valuation north of the coveted $1 billion unicorn status. No company in the space has garnered more media attention, both positive and critical, than UPSIDE Foods. No company has as much volume of cultivation capacity as UPSIDE Foods. No company is as old as UPSIDE Foods, as it was the first startup formed to take this technology out of academia and work to commercialize real meat grown slaughter-free....
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Fishing for Progress in Asia: Avant Meats
Business for Good Podcast
Asia is leading the world when it comes to semiconductors, solar panels, wind turbines, and other technologies critical for the future. In a time when several US states are the sale of cultivated meat, Asia seems to be leaning into the technology, and one of the most mature companies in the space there is . Founded in Hong Kong in 2018 and having raised about to date, Avant Meats is focused on making a dent in Asian seafood demand. In this episode, Avant founder and CEO Carrie Chan discusses why her focus is seafood, what scale she’s at and where she hopes to soon go, and how...
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Fishing for High-Margins in Cultivated Seafood: BlueNalu’s Path to Scale
Business for Good Podcast
BlueNalu is one of the better-funded companies when it comes to cultivated meat. Having raised more than $100 million, including about $35 million toward the end of 2023—a notoriously difficult time to fundraise—their founder and CEO Lou Cooperhouse is optimistic about their path to success. But as you’ll hear in this episode, Lou isn’t working to compete against the commodity meats like chicken, pork, and beef. Rather, he’s pursuing a strategy to compete against products that are exponentially higher-cost, like bluefin tuna, which can often sell for more than $100 a pound. In this...
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Is the Future of Cultivated Meat in Thailand? Aleph Farms is Betting on It
Business for Good Podcast
When you think about cultivated meat, Thailand isn’t exactly the first country that comes to mind. Sure, you may think about the US, Netherlands, Israel, and Singapore. But the Southeast Asian kingdom is where Israeli cultivated meat juggernaut Aleph Farms recently announced its first commercial factory will be. Having just received Israel’s first regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat—and the world’s first regulatory approval for cultivated beef in particular—Aleph Farms CEO Didier Toubia discusses his company’s rollout strategy with me in this conversation. As you’ll...
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Flying Cars or Electric Cars? Isha Datar’s Thoughts on Where Cultivated Meat Tech Stands Today
Business for Good Podcast
When the New York Times recently ran an declaring the infant fatality of the cultivated meat industry, Isha Datar, CEO of , was quoted as saying of the sector, “this is a bubble that is going to pop.” Given that New Harvest is intended to promote and advance the field, what did Isha mean by this? She expounded on that thought in a asserting that while she disagrees with the columnist’s conclusion that cultivated meat can never become a viable reality, she believes that the sector has been plagued by “exaggerations, lies, and broken promises.” In this episode, Isha and I talk...
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Mark Post, A Decade After the First Cultivated Burger
Business for Good Podcast
In 2013, Dr. Mark Post when he debuted the world’s first-ever burger grown from animal cells. Weighing in as a quarter-pounder, the burger carried a price tag of a mere $330,000—all of which was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. A decade later, what does Mark think about the movement and the industry he helped birth? When his burger was debuted, a grand total of zero companies existed to commercialize what would come to be called cultivated meat, no serious investment dollars had flowed into cultivated meat research, yet hopes were high that such meat would be on...
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Are Smaller Cultivators the Answer for Cultivated Meat’s Success? Niya Gupta Thinks So
Business for Good Podcast
Some of the companies in the cultivated meat space are betting that massive stainless steel cultivators—think 100,000L to 250,000L—are the path to commercialization. Niya Gupta, CEO of , is thinking smaller. She argues that there may be a more realistic path using a , void of the impellers that agitate the more conventionally used reactors in the sector. Founded in 2018, the company was spun out of , the first-ever cultivated animal product company which is now focused on materials like leather rather than meat. Having raised more than $20M in its first six years, Fork and Good...
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Josh Tetrick on the Future of the Cultivated Meat Movement
Business for Good Podcast
If you listened to the , you already know that there’s an updated paperback edition of my book that’s coming out April 9, 2024. I announced in that episode that, aligning with that release, this show will be devoted for a couple months exclusively to interviews with leaders in the cultivated meat space, many of whom are profiled in the book. And there’s perhaps no person in the cultivated meat sector who’s generated more headlines than Josh Tetrick, CEO of both and . Along with people like Mark Post and Uma Valeti, both of whom will also be guests in this podcast series,...
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Brief thoughts on the alt-meat movement and my role in it
Business for Good Podcast
I’m excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there’s a new, updated, that’s coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold. Aligning with this new edition release, for the next couple months, this podcast is going to focus squarely on the issue that’s animated my life for the past 30 years: how to wean humanity off our animal-centered diets. The extraordinary suffering of the literally trillions of animals who we farm and kill for food has plagued me for...
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Incubating Tomorrow’s Alt-Protein Unicorns: The Kitchen
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve spent any time in the startup ecosystem, you start realizing pretty quickly that the US isn’t alone in producing a lot of startups, but that there are some very small countries, like Israel and Singapore, that consistently punch above their weight when it comes to new company creation. In fact, Israel is often known as the startup nation, and there’s even a on the topic with that very title. And if you’re in the startup food technology space, whether in Israel or elsewhere, there’s one name you’re sure to know: . Founded a decade ago, The Kitchen has...
info_outlineYou know how you put all your recycling—cans, bottles, cardboard, etc.—into the same bin? Well, have you ever wondered how all that stuff gets sorted out at the recycling factory? It’s done mostly by humans.
If you watch a video about how it’s done, rest assured you’re not likely to apply for this job. These folks are standing at a conveyor belt with recyclable trash whizzing by them at every moment and they need to pick pieces off the line to put into the proper bins at a rate of 40 items per minute! It’s tough to watch the work for 30 seconds, so imagine how tough it must be to do that work for hours every day.
Well, Matanya Horowitz had a different idea. He’d been obsessed with robots since he was a kid, and fresh out of his PhD program, he wondered whether he could teach robots to sort trash more effectively and efficiently than humans.
The dude started in 2014 by dumpster diving with his girlfriend to get trash which he could start training his AI on. Then he got some government grants to hire himself and a couple others. Fast forward to today, and Horowitz’s AMP Robotics has raised $75 million from investors, employs 250 humans, has deployed a similar number of robots at recycling factories on three continents that have now sorted billions of pieces of trash, and has even opened their own recycling factory in Ohio.
Their robots pick at a rate of anywhere from 80 to 120 pieces per minute, don’t need breaks, don’t get covid, and importantly, they alter the economics of recycling to make it far more likely that what goes into the recycling bin actually ends up getting recycled.
In this episode, we talk all about the economics of AMP’s robots, the trajectory Matanya took from being an academic roboticist to becoming a CEO, the role venture capital has played in the company, what mistakes along the way were made, whether he thinks robots will ever become sentient, and more.
It’s an impressive and inspirational story from a scientist who’s using his business to help solve a pressing sustainability problem for humanity.
Discussed in this episode
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Matanya is influenced by the Jewish tale of Golem
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He’s also a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s work
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And he recommends reading The Innovator’s Dilemma and Paul Graham’s essays
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Matanya gave a cool TEDx speech about robotics
Want to read a transcript of this episode? You’re in luck!
More about Matanya Horowitz
Dr. Matanya Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of AMP Robotics™ an industrial artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company that is fundamentally changing the economics of recycling, by lowering processing costs and extracting maximum value from waste streams.
Matanya developed and commercialized AMP’s breakthrough AI platform, AMP Neuron™, and robotics system, AMP Cortex™, which automates high-speed identification, sorting, picking, and processing of material streams. AMP’s machine learning technology continuously improves performance adapting to the complex, ever changing material characteristics of municipal solid waste, construction and demolition (C&D), e-waste, and metal scrap. Recognizing attributes down to the SKU and Brand level, AMP can provide unprecedented data transparency and insights on waste streams to inform decisions and unite the value chain of circularity.
Matanya was just individually recognized as Waste360’s ‘2019 Innovator of the Year’ award, in addition to being named to their ‘40 under 40’ list. AMP has received numerous awards and international recognition, including The Circulars 2018 Award for ‘Circular Economy Top Tech Disruptor’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the NWRA’s (National Waste and Recycling Association) ‘2017 Innovator of the Year’ award.
Matanya earned multiple degrees including a BS in Electrical Engineering, BS in Computer Science, BS in Applied Mathematics, BA in Economics, and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. Matanya holds a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology with publications and research in control theory, path planning, and computer vision.