TrashBot is an intelligent waste management system utilizing AI and robotics. CleanRobotics developed TrashBot as a solution to human-error introduced during recycling. This climate friendly robot separates recyclable waste from compostable waste with a 96% accuracy, a task that humans in crowded environments struggle to do with 50% accuracy.

Tanner Cook recalls his story of bringing TrashBot from just an idea into a fully built out and shipped tool. The idea was born out of their customer discovery interviews where they found frustration from the fact that people in crowded areas do a poor job recycling. These discussions led to a paid pilot with a Fortune 500 company in Pittsburgh.

As a company, CleanRobotics runs on Lean methodically. This means they are constantly focused on verifying that their functional requirements meet the needs of their customer. During customer discovery, CleanRobotics focused on validating their customers had the money for their solution, answering the question of where the money was coming from, and understanding what was going wrong that justified the customers paying for a solution.

At its core, TrashBot is a high-performance sorting machine. It can factor in the context of where it is to help improve the sorting performance.

Tanner leaves us with the final advice “make sure you’re building a solution to a problem instead of just building”