Syntetica raises $30M Series A to recycle the nylon fashion can't afford to throw away

Syntetica, a Paris-based startup founded in 2023 by Marco Bertone (CEO) and Louis Monsigny, has raised $30 million (approximately €27 million) in a Series A led by Bpifrance's Ecotechnologies 2 fund under the France 2030 plan. The round brings in EQT Ventures (returning from the 2024 seed), SWEN Capital Partners, garment manufacturer MAS Holdings, activewear brand Lululemon, materials group Indorama Ventures, the family offices of Peugeot and Etam, and the European Innovation Council (EIC), which contributed equity, grants, and access to its acceleration programme. The capital goes toward building a commercial demonstration facility in Clermont-Ferrand — in partnership with Michelin's Centre for Sustainable Materials — and, beyond that, establishing recycling facilities globally, sited near waste sources and textile production centres.

The chemistry problem nobody wanted to solve

Nylon appears in almost every corner of modern manufacturing — clothing, tents, ropes, automotive parts, kitchen equipment. Its durability is precisely what makes it a problem: it does not degrade, and it does not come in one form. The two most widely used variants, Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6, have different chemical structures and have historically required separate recycling streams. Post-consumer textile waste combines them freely; sorting it economically at scale has not been done. The result: less than 1% of recyclable clothing is re-made into new textiles globally (BCG, 2024).

Syntetica has developed a patented chemical depolymerisation process that handles both nylon types in a single step, without requiring feedstock to be sorted first. The output is not recycled fabric — it is pellets, the upstream raw material that yarn producers such as MAS Holdings use to manufacture new textile. That distinction matters: Syntetica positions itself as a materials supplier to existing industrial processes, not a competing fibre company, which substantially reduces the market-entry friction.

The industrial investor thesis

"For decades, mixed nylon waste has been considered too complex and too expensive to recycle at scale," Bertone told Sifted. "We have shown that it is possible to recover high-value materials from the waste streams the industry has historically written off."

The investor list is deliberately industrial. MAS Holdings — one of the world's largest garment manufacturers — and Indorama Ventures, a Singaporean materials conglomerate, are supply-chain actors with direct reasons to want this to work. The family offices of Peugeot and Etam bring brand-side conviction. Lululemon's participation mirrors its broader cleantech-textile strategy: the brand has also backed Epoch Biodesign and Samsara Eco, both working on synthetic-material recycling. For Bertone, the coalition is designed from the start: "We have built the company with the clarity that there's no green premium. That if you want to scale real solutions for a sustainable world, it needs to be cost competitive, highly scalable, and you need to build partnerships from the very start."

There is also a timely macro argument. Oil-market disruption over the past six months has driven nylon price volatility to a weekly cadence — an unusual frequency for a commodity that fashion supply chains had treated as stable. "It's been a wake-up call to many brands that have been relying on petrol-sourced nylon and petrol-sourced synthetics for pricing and convenience, and which today have seen massive shocks to their system," Bertone said. That context does not prove demand for Syntetica's pellets; it does suggest that the cost-competitiveness argument is landing differently than it would have twelve months ago.

The 18-month proof

The Series A is not buying commercial scale — it is buying the demonstration that commercial scale is possible. The Clermont-Ferrand facility, built with Michelin, is designed to produce hundreds of tons of pellets per year. A single mid-size textile factory consumes thousands of tons of raw nylon annually: "hundreds of tons" is proof-of-concept, not supply.

Syntetica's path was built through the Entrepreneur First programme at Station F in Paris, where Bertone — a fashion and second-hand e-commerce veteran — met Monsigny, a chemistry researcher. They refined the process at AgroParisTech's lab in Reims before hiring CTO Ash Ward, formerly of Northvolt. Northvolt co-founder Peter Carlsson is a Syntetica advisor. That combination of chemistry depth (Monsigny holds a PhD with post-doctoral work in catalyst design and molecular catalysis) and industrial scar tissue from one of the most high-profile scale-up failures in European cleantech history is, at minimum, relevant experience for what comes next.

Competitors exist — BASF has a recycled nylon programme; enzymatic-recycling startups are pursuing adjacent chemistry. Bertone's response is coalition-wide: "If everyone were to scale to tens of factories, we still wouldn't solve this problem. Everyone needs to succeed for us to succeed as a society." Whether that philosophy survives the margin negotiations at the Clermont-Ferrand facility is the first real test.