Sortrace has secured SEK 8M (about $800K) for its system of truck-mounted cameras that check how well households sort their rubbish. The round was led by Almi Invest, the venture capital arm of Swedish state-owned Almi, and is the startup’s first formal funding. Existing backer Antler, Helsinki-based pre-seed fund Gorilla Capital and several angel investors also took part.
Chief executive Rahel Surshi co-founded the Stockholm company with Tomas Kjellstrand. Sortrace has five paying municipalities in Sweden under contract and also works with organisations in the recycling sector, though none have been named. The company says it will use the money to meet demand from municipalities and to take its technology beyond collection trucks into other stages of waste management.
“We make mis-sorting visible at every emptying, so municipalities can act where the problems actually are,” Surshi said.
How The Cameras Work
Cameras mounted on collection trucks capture images of household waste as each bin is emptied. Software then uses computer vision, the branch of AI that interprets images, to identify what is in the waste and turn the pictures into organised data. The system flags material placed in the wrong bin and tracks collection patterns, linking each result to the individual bin and the truck’s route. Municipal staff then see the results on dashboards.
Sortrace launched the product in 2025, and its first system went live in October that year. Beyond its current municipal customers, the startup says more municipalities are in its pipeline and that it is in talks with private companies.
Sortrace says municipalities can use the findings to target the areas where sorting goes wrong, and argues that better data could lower waste management costs, send less waste to incineration and raise recycling rates. The company also says that its analysis protects privacy and that images are stored within the European Union.
How Sorting Is Checked Today
Swedish municipalities usually measure sorting through pick analyses, in which samples of household waste are sorted by hand and weighed to show what each bin contains. National industry body Avfall Sverige has compiled the results of analyses carried out between 2021 and 2023. The median figures show that food waste made up about 23% to 25% of the residual bin, the bin meant for whatever cannot be recycled, and packaging for roughly another quarter.
Pick analyses rely on samples taken at a single point in time. Sortrace’s cameras work differently, checking each bin every time a truck empties it, giving municipalities a continuous record tied to specific bins and routes.
Sweden’s New Waste Rules
Swedish municipalities now carry more responsibility for how household waste is handled. Households and businesses have had to separate food and garden waste for collection since 1 January 2024, when municipalities also took over the collection of household packaging. Municipalities must also offer packaging collection at or near every home by 1 January 2027 at the latest.
Much of what Swedish households throw away is still burned. Avfall Sverige’s latest figures show that Sweden treated about 424 kg of household waste per person in 2025, and more than half of it went to energy recovery, meaning incineration that produces heat and electricity. About a quarter was sent for material recycling.
“Municipalities face new requirements and are investing heavily in collection and in information to households,” Surshi said. “But without data, no one knows whether those efforts work.”
Quality checks continue further down the recycling chain. Helsinki startup Ambio tests recycled plastic against agreed requirements before delivering it to manufacturers.
Sortrace’s cameras are designed to turn each bin emptying into a record of what households throw away and where sorting goes wrong. The startup now plans to bring that record to more municipalities and to stages of waste management beyond the collection truck.
