Optocycle Wins Innovation Award for AI Technology to Analyze Construction Waste

At the end of June, the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken Virtual Reality Innovation Award for SMEs 2024 was awarded in Stuttgart. This year, the main prize, worth 20,000 euros, was won by the Tübingen-based Optocycle, which impressed with its technology to make recycling construction waste more efficient.

The core of the technology is artificial intelligence that recognizes and analyzes metal construction waste. This greatly simplifies the recycling of construction waste and brings transparency to the world’s largest material flow, says Max-Friedrich Gerken, founder and CEO of Optocycle.

The startup, founded two years ago, describes the application of the technology as follows: First, the heterogeneous mineral waste being delivered, such as concrete, brick, plaster or ceramics, is captured by a camera; it doesn’t matter whether the material arrives on a truck, a skip or a conveyor belt. In the next step, the images are evaluated by Optocycle’s AI and sent to partner companies in real time so they can better classify and invoice the materials being delivered. Optocycle’s system largely replaces this previous analog process.

In the future, the company wants to improve the direct analysis of the material and provide additional information on grain size, particles and impurities. Gerken speaks of great interest in the optics cycle technology. In the next step, this will be expanded so that it can implement the system in other partner companies.