Introduction
On Episode 3 of Bits and Atoms, Elias Can sits down with Johnny Longden, Co-Founder and CEO of TeraSort, a Manchester-based climate tech startup rethinking how recycling works from the ground up. Johnny shares his journey into entrepreneurship, his long-standing passion for sustainability, and why waste management is one of the most complex, and impactful, problems to solve. The conversation dives into how advances in robotics and AI are unlocking a new approach to waste management, TeraSort’s vision for fully robotic modular sorting units, and the technical and commercial challenges of building hardware-driven climate tech. Johnny also opens up about staging product development, fundraising strategies, and balancing mission-driven impact with commercial scale.
Interview
Elias Can: Hello and welcome to Bits and Atoms, the Grishin Robotics founder series. I'm your host, Elias Can, and today I've got Johnny Longden, Co-Founder and CEO of TeraSort, joining me. To get started, Johnny, would you mind sharing a quick intro about you and TeraSort?
Johnny Longden: Thanks, Elias, for having me. I'm the founder of TeraSort, we are a Manchester-based climate tech company building a fully robotic modular recycling unit. Really what we're trying to do is help improve the performance of recycling; ultimately maximize the amount of material we do recycle and minimize the amount that goes to landfill and incineration. The team is myself and Phil, he's the more technical side of the two of us. I'm an engineer by background and I've worked across the waste industry in a variety of different roles, including consulting and at startups. I was lucky enough to be part of the first cohort of the Grishin Robotics Accelerator here in London and meet everyone there. So yeah, thanks for having me!
Elias Can: Yeah, we loved having you for it!
Elias Can: Great, let's jump into some questions. To get started, what originally motivated or inspired you to take the leap and become a founder?
Johnny Longden: As long as I can remember it's ultimately been the goal. I've done a few different things, but this was always the end state that I was working towards. I think the reason for that is a couple of things. Part of it is the desire to build something for myself, and part of it is really being energized by the chaotic startup environment…that's where I want to be. Also for me and for what we’re doing, it’s a climate tech company at heart. I've always wanted to have some kind of impact on sustainability, and I think building something for the waste problem is probably the best way that I can have that impact. So it’s a variety of factors, but it’s exciting to take the leap and it’s always been the plan.
Elias Can: It sounds like a really strong innate, intrinsic realization of what you’ve wanted to do, and I love the focus on climate tech as well.
Elias Can: You started to touch on it, and maybe just to go a little bit further, how did you land on redesigning recycling within climate tech?
Johnny Longden: Waste management, and to a wider extent circularity and the circular economy, is what I've been interested in for a while. Going back to my university engineering days, it's the problem that always stood out the most and I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One, partly because the production of waste and the complexity of dealing with it is such a constant of life. It’s always changing, and at the moment always increasing…so it’s just a big global problem that needs to be managed. Alongside that, for me it’s a fascinating combination of engineering, physical challenges, dirty environments, and commercial problems. There’s also a behavioral aspect that makes it a more holistic problem that’s really interesting to work on. Initially it was just the interest in waste, but I think how we landed on what we’re trying to do is something that Phil and myself saw before and came to this.
There’s a significant opportunity at the moment, resulting from the combination of massive cost reductions in robotics and advancements in AI. It’s easier to build and train computer vision models and build fully optimized systems, and in the waste industry there is an opportunity to make a transformative change and unlock a whole new set of ways of doing things that weren’t possible before. Particularly some wholesale changes to how we manage waste and hopefully massively reduce the cost for waste managers, in addition to solving some of the other challenges around flexibility and future-proofing.
Elias Can: I'd love to double-click on the challenges piece that you mentioned, and for folks who are listening who are less familiar with how waste management is handled today, what is that process like? Globally we use a lot of products daily, weekly, monthly, and the volume is growing, so how do they operate today and where is the opportunity there?
Johnny Longden: How waste is handled and how recycling is done in different countries does have some differences, but there's a lot of similarities across it. In the UK, one of the misconceptions can be that the recycling that gets collected isn't sorted or it doesn't necessarily matter what happens to it. That's not true. The waste that gets collected for recycling in the UK gets sorted at facilities that are often out of sight for a lot of people outside the industry. That sorting process is difficult, it's complicated….no one piece looks exactly like the last one. So when it comes to sorting that waste into the single material outputs that you need in order to reuse it as a raw material, that process can look very complicated. It tends to be done in large industrial facilities. There are complex mechanical engineering setups, multi-step processes even across automated facilities, and manual labor because everything is a slight edge case. So you need to be able to pick up the stuff that the equipment doesn’t solve or things that might damage the equipment, all of that comes together to say that complexity drives cost. While you are generating valuable raw material outputs that can be reused, it is an expensive process to sort them and makes it harder to deploy new capacity or change capacity. It makes it harder to make recycled materials cost competitive with virgin materials.
What we want to do with TeraSort, using the advances in AI and the cost reductions in robotics, is to simplify the mechanical elements of the process so that you can reduce that fixed cost of equipment in operation and move some of that complexity into software. By doing so significantly lowers cost sorting, but also because we can add flexibility, enable not just lower cost sorting but the ability to sort more dynamically. Sorting dynamically to the material specification allows you to adapt in real-time to any changes in the waste stream, which is important because the composition is always changing. So being able to adapt to it both right now for daily fluctuations in waste composition but also for five years down the line if there’s new materials is important because you don’t have to go and change around a facility or do a retrofit of your existing facility.
Elias Can: I'm sure the existing facility layouts are very complex and challenging to do any kind of retrofitting to as well.
Elias Can: There’s pure-play software products that folks can spin up easily and ship now with AI, things that used to take a few weeks can take maybe a couple of hours. With what you’re building at TeraSort it’s going to be a much different process than a pure-play software product. What are some of the key roadmap or checkpoints for you? How are you staging product development at TeraSort?
Johnny Longden: Inevitably we have a hardware element and that building and shipping process doesn’t look like software. What we are always trying to do with our product development is keep the physical and hardware elements as standardized and off-the-shelf as possible. We want to be overlaying the control and the intelligence to direct this but we want to minimize the amount of bespoke equipment that we’re using because the whole idea and requirement is to reduce costs and also to make use of advances in robotics as they become available.
When it comes to development, it follows that natural evolution towards that full unit that we’re building. You can think of it in terms of shape and size as a shipping container with 10 to 20 robots and integrated hopper sorting mixed waste directly into single material outputs. We’ve gone through the single robot demonstrator in the early phase to the first multi-robot system and using that first multi-robot system with just a couple of robots to really nail that sorting process and optimize it to get the robots working together. The next step is an MVP unit in a live site to learn more about the process and operating in the field, then taking those learnings to develop the full commercial unit that we can then roll out. So it goes through stages, but we want to move quickly because there’s an opportunity here and we can leverage as much standardized componentry as we can to reduce the lead time.
Elias Can: It’s really interesting to hear about those milestones and the progression. You’re building up at each moment in time to something bigger all the way to creating something that’s a shipping container in size. It’s not like you would go out and do that from day one, it would have too many unknowns and variables around it.
Johnny Longden: Yeah, exactly. Each different size brings its own aspects on the technical side to focus on. Staging allows us to break down the technical challenges into more manageable blocks. Each one brings a new challenge to overcome, but we’re not trying to do it all at once.
Elias Can: Switching gears a little bit here, since I know you're fundraising right now, what have been some of your best strategies for finding potential investors so far? How does that process look for you?
Johnny Longden: It has been an intensive process. The advice that we got from Dmitry at the start of the accelerator is that warm introductions, especially from portfolio company founders, are the most powerful way we can reach investors and start on the right footing. There’s a sign of credibility of who you are and what you’re trying to do. That has been one of the focuses for us, finding people that believe in what we’re trying to do and will make that introduction. Alongside that, we do some cold outreach to funds that we really like but don’t necessarily have someone that can make an introduction for us.
Elias Can: Yeah, warm leads are great. Whether it’s a VC to VC introduction or founder to VC introduction, I’ve found as well it can be a big help having the social proof of it coming from somebody you respect.
Elias Can: From the investors that you’ve spoken with already, maybe some are more mission aligned and some are more purely financial return. Do you get a sense early on when you’re speaking to an investor where they sit in that mission vs financial return spectrum?
Johnny Longden: I think to an extent for the extremely mission-driven investors, their core thesis is normally a sort of known part of what they want to do. It can change to an extent, but for us we always believe that if we successfully recycle material then the sustainability impact will be from the commercial returns and scaling what we do. So in essence the sustainability impact is a byproduct of achieving the scale and commercial return we want to achieve. We’re always very happy to talk to, and love talking to, impact-driven investors who share the same overall mission as us. We’ve been lucky enough to meet some great ones over time.
Elias Can: Absolutely, and you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other, both can be an outcome here.
Elias Can: Thank you, Johnny, for joining me on Bits and Atoms. It was great to have you here today, I'll let you get back to building!
Johnny Longden: Thanks for having me!
TeraSort is a climate tech company reducing the cost and increasing the performance of recycling. TeraSort's drop-in, fully robotic, modular recycling units can be quickly and easily deployed to new and existing waste sites, maximizing material recovery and improving waste manager margins.
Grishin Robotics is a Silicon Valley-based VC firm focused on investing in early-stage companies in broader consumer categories. Grishin Robotics has invested in category-defining companies such as Ring (acquired by Amazon), Spin (acquired by Ford), Zipline, Starship, and many others.
