Ravel Raises $8.2M Seed to Recycle Spandex Blended Fabrics
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Ravel has raised $8.2 million to scale a recycling technology that pulls apart synthetic fabric blends. One Small Planet led the Seed round, with significant participation from AP Ventures. Overlay Capital and Lichen Ventures also invested, along with existing backers At One Ventures, Collateral Good, and BetterWay.
The Seattle company has gone after one specific fiber: elastane, also sold as spandex or Lycra. It shows up in athletic wear, jackets, jeans, underwear, socks, t-shirts, gloves, and essentially every other apparel category, and even small amounts of it make a garment difficult to recycle.
Ravel’s textiles technology unblends fabrics containing elastane and converts the recovered material into cost-competitive recycled plastic pellets, the raw input for making polyester fabrics. The company calls the process purification recycling and says it is energy efficient, uses safe chemicals, and produces no added waste or byproducts.
The money moves the Washington company from its Seattle pilot plant toward commercial-scale operations, and lets it validate the technology at production scale with textile partners.
The scale of the underlying problem explains the interest. Most clothing collected for recycling today gets downcycled into lower-value uses rather than spun back into apparel. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has estimated that less than 1% of the material used to make clothing ends up recycled into new clothing. Meanwhile apparel brands now produce roughly twice the volume of clothes they made in the early 2000s.
CEO Zahlen Titcomb has pointed out that materials recovery and valorization happen largely out of public view, which is part of why the opportunity is as large as it is.
Ravel announced pre-seed funding in March 2025 without disclosing the amount, and was a finalist for the Sustainable Innovation Award at the 2026 GeekWire Awards.
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