A lot of things might spring to mind when you hear “fashion,” but taking care of the planet generally isn’t on that list. Smartex just raised a couple of bolts’ worth of cash, sowing up a round of funding to bring smart tech to fabric manufacturing. The hope is to be able to detect textile defects in real time. The company is pushing hard on the green angle for its products.
Smartex has developed machine-vision-driven software that makes fabric production more efficient by identifying defects, which primarily can be used to stop manufacturing if something is going wrong, preventing waste. In particular, the company argues that imperfect fabric can travel down the supply chain, with product issues only getting discovered much later in the manufacturing process.
“I was born and raised by textile factory workers, I worked in factories when I was a teenager, I have a master’s in physics and the textile industry has been chasing me since ever,” said Gilberto Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Smartex, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We co-founded Smartex because we’re obsessed with solving problems — and the textile industry has big ones. It’s probably the industry with the worst ratio size / automation. Textile factories don’t have the tools to produce in a clean, transparent, efficient way… generating massive amounts of waste and other problems.”
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