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Countless startups have promised to revolutionise the fashion industry, but few have managed to break through, and even fewer have managed to achieve change at scale. So what does it take? And how do you spot the startups with the most potential?
These questions are the crux of the Trailblazer Award from non-profit Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) and PDS Ventures, the investment arm of sourcing and manufacturing platform PDS Group. Now in its second year, the award seeks to accelerate sustainability at scale. The winner receives a $200,000 investment, access to commercial and operational support from PDS Group’s Positive Materials subsidiary, and scaling opportunities with fellow members of the PDS Group portfolio, as well as mentoring from inaugural winner Bloom Labs.
Last night, at the closing dinner for GFA’s flagship event, the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen, CEO Federica Marchionni unveiled the winner. US-based startup Refiberd, which has developed an artificial intelligence-powered textile-detection technology, took home the prize, beating fellow finalists MannyAI and Matereal. The finalists were chosen from over 200 applicants, split across 44 countries. “It has been really energising to see the momentum building globally,” says Marchionni. “There are so many organisations out there who are trying to innovate. The key now is to help them scale.”
The secret sauce
Finding the startups with the most potential for sustainable change is no easy task. This year’s jury included senior executives from sustainability platform Fashion For Good, research centre MIT Climate Grand Challenges, brands Ralph Lauren and Zalando, and award co-creators GFA and PDS Ventures. They judged applicants against five criteria: relevance to key sustainability challenges, potential to create positive social or environmental impact, innovative or disruptive thinking, feasibility, and potential to scale.
At such an early stage, founders are the most important metric, says Ankur Agarwal, head of venture capital investments at PDS Ventures. “Are they a seasoned founder? Do they see things differently? Are they charismatic enough to raise investment and can they actually scale up a company?” Agarwal says.
The jury was also looking for founders who could handle the pressures of running a larger company further down the road, adds Pallak Seth, founder and executive vice chairman at PDS Group. “The skill required to go from zero to ‘X’ is one thing, but then you have to be able to put a proper management structure in place and have the bandwidth to manage teams, while keeping an eye on the numbers and giving the right leadership.”
The newly created award, announced at the Global Fashion Summit on Tuesday, was designed to provide financial and operational support to the winner.
Whether or not solutions work at scale depends heavily on how well the wider industry supports them. Despite attracting tens of millions of dollars in funding, more mature solutions like Renewcell and Stella McCartney-backed leather alternative Mylo have faltered, with brands failing to stump up sufficient orders and offtake agreements.
That’s why the award brings brands, retailers and academics into the jury, says Seth. “We are trying to create an ecosystem around the startups, so there are the investors who fund it, the retailers who back it, the manufacturers who utilise the technology, and the venture capitalists who get the focus. There is a big issue at the moment, which is that new technology requires a bit of an upcharge, but a lot of these companies struggle to get commitment from the industry. There are many businesses trying to solve the same problems — the company that has the right backing is the one that ends up succeeding.”
Last year, the finalists skewed heavily towards materials science, which made it harder to judge. To remedy this, applicants were filtered into three categories for 2025: working with nature, closed-loop pathways and tech-powered transformation. Matereal, Refiberd and MannyAI won each category, respectively. Vogue Business caught up with all three to hear how they plan to tackle the industry’s mounting challenges.
Working with nature: Matereal
Matereal is tackling one of fashion’s most pervasive, but often overlooked, problems: polyurethane. Founder and CEO Jacqueline Ros Amable says Matereal has developed a bio-based alternative to polyurethane, called Polaris. Using a combination of plants, recycled monomers and carbon emissions, it mirrors the properties of polyurethane without the most toxic, petrochemical-based component, isocyanate. Its current iteration — the company will continue to develop different forms — takes the shape of thermoplastic chips, which can be used in coatings, films, lamination and injection moulding. An independent life cycle assessment found Polaris to be a million times less toxic than conventional polyurethane, using 50 per cent less carbon.
“I call polyurethane the creepy plastic, because it’s absolutely everywhere in fashion,” says Ros Amable. “The chances are that most leather — whether it’s real or made from pineapple — is coated in polyurethane. When you dye textiles, you often dunk them in a polyurethane bath. When you have shoes, bags and coats containing PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals”), the flip side of that is often a polyurethane membrane. It’s used so much more than people realise.”
As of last month, Matereal can produce up to 50 kilograms in one production run, but this is only the beginning, Ros Amable flags. By the end of this year, the goal is to produce 200 kilograms, eventually scaling up to be a plug-and-play solution that can slot into existing production lines. The average polyurethane factory churns through around 30,000 tonnes a year, she continues. If Matereal can reach that scale — which would take considerable investment and widespread buy-in from brands — it will be “price competitive”, sitting at the upper end of conventional polyurethane and at the lower end of bio-based alternatives.
Matereal has developed an artificial intelligence-powered tool that can create custom formulations, tailored to specific supply chains and impact goals, filtering through hundreds of potential formulas and uses to find the best one for each client in a matter of minutes. “The long-term vision is to use the AI platform to translate our formulations into a language that designers understand, referencing things like hand feel and tensile strength,” explains Ros Amable.
Closed-loop pathways: Refiberd
Many sustainability experts are pinning their hopes on circular fashion to decouple financial growth from material resource use, but there is a growing tension at the heart of circular fashion systems, which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. In order to recycle textiles at scale, you need to know what they are made from, and you need to be able to sort them quickly — which is where Refiberd comes in. The company has developed an AI solution that uses hyperspectral imaging to figure out the material composition of a garment. Co-founder and CEO Sarika Bajaj says this could help solve the current crisis in textile recycling, which has seen several high-profile sorters shutter, overwhelmed by the influx of low-quality (and often blended) garments.
The potential applications are manifold, continues Bajaj. “Every recycler needs to know the material content of textiles to have any level of efficiency, but we also see resale as an emerging market. Can we identify counterfeits using material analysis? And with digital product passports [DPPs], can we use material analysis to validate information at different stages of the supply chain?” She says Refiberd could save a textile recycler sorting 50,000 tonnes per year up to $7.5 million, by reducing the amount of uncategorised waste tossed aside (assuming the cost of one wasted garment is around $3).
Doing this with a high level of accuracy is a tall order, which is why Refiberd has been focusing on running pilot programmes — it has 12 under its belt to date — and partnering with brands and manufacturers to train the AI. “When you look at textiles today, everything is a complex blend,” says Bajaj. “Then there are coatings and dyes on top, which makes it very challenging to identify the base material. We have spent the last four years processing over 100,000 textile samples to clean the data and prove our concept. Now it’s time to push out and integrate our solution into circular processes.”
Tech-powered transformation: MannyAI
MannyAI is trying to tackle multiple problems at once, with the end goal of enabling on-demand manufacturing for brands and manufacturers. Its proprietary platform gathers real-time data from manufacturers at Tier 1 and Tier 2, focusing on fabric availability, machinist capacity and supplier capabilities. This allows brands to see which factories and fabric mills have capacity for quick turnaround orders, potentially unlocking on-demand manufacturing, reducing overproduction and allowing brands to respond quicker to trends.
“For a long time, it has been cheaper to buy larger quantities with longer lead times. But the market is getting more and more fragmented, and brands don’t always know what is going to sell that far in advance,” says CEO and co-founder Shruti Grover. “Typically, on-demand manufacturing has been restricted to glorified merchandising — printing on an existing garment or a blank [pre-made garments sold to brands and manufacturers without any branding or designs]. For brands to really crack it, it needs to be possible on any garment, at preferred mills and factories who they have existing relationships with.”
There is no extra lift for already over-burdened suppliers, says Grover, whose background is in manufacturing. That’s because the platform gathers data that suppliers are already inputting elsewhere — whether it’s an AI-powered traceability platform or a simple spreadsheet. The return is service-level agreements (SLA) with partner brands, which allows suppliers to forecast and plan better, because they know how much capacity they will need to allocate for each brand in advance, and there is a commitment to back up any additional investment in staff or machinery. It saves time for brands, too. “The issue with on-demand manufacturing is that you go from four collections per year to 52 or even more, which creates a lot more work for your team,” says Grover. “But MannyAI streamlines the process.”
Update: This story has been updated with the news of Refiberd’s win (6 June 2025).
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