Everbloom built an AI to turn chicken feathers into cashmere

Cashmere sweaters are widely available these days, often at incredibly low prices. The appeal is obvious: if you’ve ever worn cashmere, you know it’s soft, light and warm: an impressive fiber that’s hard to give up. Unfortunately, those bargain prices usually come with a catch.

Cashmere comes from the fine undercoat of a handful of goat breeds. Normally, one goat is sheared twice a year, resulting in only 113 to 170 grams of cashmere being produced annually. That’s not a lot of supply for a growing market.

“The commodity producers are actually under a lot of pressure,” says Sim Gulati, co-founder and CEO of Everbloomtold TechCrunch. “What you’re seeing now, especially with the advent of $50 cashmere sweaters, is that they are being sheared a lot more often. The quality of the fibers is not as good and it leads to unsustainable livestock practices.”

Instead of trying to change livestock farming practices or convince consumers to buy only high-quality cashmere, Gulati and his team at Everbloom had a different idea. The startup, which has raised more than $8 million from investors including Hoxton Ventures and SOSV, wanted to create an upcycled material that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

To do this, Everbloom created a materials science AI called Braid.AI. The model can fine-tune various parameters to create fibers with different qualities. Cashmere is one target, but so are other materials commonly used in the textile industry.

At its core, Everbloom’s process is the same, regardless of the end product. To make its material, the company currently collects waste from across the fiber supply chain, including cashmere and wool farms and factories, as well as down bedding suppliers. In the future, it plans to expand to other waste sources, including feathers from the poultry industry. These waste streams have one thing in common: they are all made of keratin, the main protein underlying Everbloom’s process.

The company then cuts the waste to size and combines it with proprietary compounds. The mixture is forced through a plastic extruder (which shapes the material by forcing it through a die), and the pellets that come out the other side are fed through spinning machines normally used to produce polyester fibers. “That equipment is used for 80% of the textile market,” says Gulati. “You have to be a replacement.”

To convert waste into new fibers, all the necessary chemical reactions take place in these two machines. Everbloom can create fibers that mimic everything from polyester to cashmere, using its AI to adjust the formulation and how the two machines process it.

The startup said every fiber it produces must be biodegradable, even the polyester substitute.

“All the components we use are biodegradable,” Gulati said, adding that his company is currently putting its products through accelerated testing to prove the hypothesis. And because Everbloom uses waste products, its impact on the environment will be dramatically lower, he said.

Moreover, it should also be cheaper. “We want it to be more economically viable for brands and consumers,” Gulati said. “I don’t believe in a ‘sustainability premium’” – the idea that environmentally friendly products should cost more. “To ensure that a material is successful – both in the supply chain [and for] the consumer – ​​you must have both a product benefit and an economic benefit for everyone who comes into contact with the product. That is what we are aiming for.”