Syntetica, the nylon recycling startup that promises to recycle mixed post-consumer textiles, has closed a $30 million Series A backed by Lululemon, Sri Lanka-based manufacturer MAS Holdings, and a clutch of public and private investors. The round’s lead investor is the Ecotechnologies 2 fund, managed by the Green Venture team at Bpifrance, France’s public investment bank. The pitch is simple enough: turn the nylon spandex blend in your discarded leggings back into usable pellets. Executing it is considerably harder.
The Syntetica Nylon Recycling Startup Targeting What Others Skip
Most recycling processes prefer clean, pre-sorted manufacturing offcuts. Knitting Industry reports that Syntetica’s technology is designed specifically for post-consumer textiles, the messy, unsorted pile of Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6 that arrives mixed together in consumer waste streams and that conventional sorting cannot easily separate. The output is not yarn, and not a finished fabric. It is pellets, which manufacturers like MAS Holdings can then spin into new yarn themselves. That keeps Syntetica focused on one thing and positions it at the industrial rather than consumer end of the supply chain.
Alexandre Wagner, investment director at Bpifrance Green Venture, described the company as having developed a differentiated technology addressing one of the textile industry’s most complex recycling challenges. Sid Amalean, director of group innovation at MAS Holdings, framed the investment as a strategic move combining brand commitment, manufacturing expertise, and industrial scale-up, which explains why an apparel manufacturer with no obvious incentive to back an unproven chemical recycler chose to write a cheque.
The commercial demonstration facility, established in partnership with Michelin’s Centre for Sustainable Materials in Clermont-Ferrand, is expected to process hundreds of tonnes of post-consumer textile waste annually, marking Syntetica’s transition from laboratory work to industrial production.
Oil Prices, Regulation, and a Very Convenient Moment
Syntetica’s CEO Marco Bertone is not shy about the tailwinds. Geopolitical disruption in the oil industry has pushed nylon prices into quarterly or even weekly renegotiations over the last six months, he told TechCrunch. ‘It’s been a wake-up call to many brands that have been relying on petrol-sourced nylon and petrol-sourced synthetics for pricing and convenience, and which today have seen massive shocks to their system,’ he said.
The regulatory backdrop helps too. The Ecotechnologies 2 fund sits within the broader France 2030 plan, President Emmanuel Macron’s €34 billion re-industrialisation and ecological transition programme announced in October 2021, in which Bpifrance acts as a major operator. Public backing does not stop there: Syntetica has also received support from the European Innovation Council through its Accelerator programme, which combines grants of up to €2.5 million with equity investments ranging from €0.5 million to €15 million. It is a generous system, and Syntetica has made good use of it.
The Ecotechnologies 2 fund, for its part, has an appetite beyond textiles. In March 2026, it led a €25 million equity tranche within a €30 million Series B for Standing Ovation, a French precision fermentation company, according to a GlobeNewswire announcement. The pattern is consistent: back deep-tech European industrial plays at Series A and B stage, help them reach commercial demonstration, and hope the France 2030 branding translates into actual factories.
Bertone’s pitch is deliberately free of green premiums. ‘We have built the company with the clarity that there’s no green premium. That if you want to scale real solutions for a sustainable world, it needs to be cost competitive, highly scalable, and you need to build partnerships from the very start,’ he said. The brand partners signed up so far, including Lululemon, Victoria’s Secret, and Etam, with a recycling project that could go to market early next year, suggest the pitch is landing.
Syntetica’s founding team came together through Entrepreneur First’s accelerator at Station F in Paris: Bertone, a fashion and second-hand e-commerce veteran, matched with chemistry researcher Louis Monsigny, and the two built out their early work at AgroParisTech’s lab in Reims. CTO Ash Ward, previously at failed battery company Northvolt, rounds out the team. Ward’s former Northvolt colleague Peter Carlsson sits on Syntetica’s advisory board, bringing a particular kind of scar tissue about the gap between ambition and industrial execution.
Bertone’s own framing on risk is direct: ‘As a startup, we have to be comfortable taking more risks than industrials; otherwise, there would be no innovation. But there’s also a line: when you parallelize too many risks, then it can become complex.’ For now, the $30 million goes towards proving the demo facility can reliably produce hundreds of tonnes of pellets per year and deliver them to clients. Global facilities, Bertone says, come after that proof is in hand.
