TeknTrash Robotics
"Providing dangerous industries with robotic-based solutions"
London start-up deploying ALPHA, a wheeled dual-arm humanoid trained on VR-captured worker data to sort waste in recycling plants under a RaaS model.
TeknTrash Robotics is a London-based company that develops AI and robotic systems for unhealthy, unsanitary and dangerous workplaces, starting with recycling plants. It began as an AI and analytics start-up tracking products at the 'point of disposal' to give brands post-sale consumption data, with consumer reward platforms such as ProduTrak and Stipra, and it has since refocused on humanoid robots for waste sorting. The website's legal terms state that TeknTrash is a brand of Synthetic Data Inc Ltd, registered in England and Wales (company number 11681259), and is also registered in Delaware as TeknTrash Inc. Its UK office is at 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, and it has a China base at Suzhou Industrial Park. Al Costa is named as founder and CEO in press coverage, while the current team page lists Ruiyan Xu as CEO and Dr. Ketao Zhang as robotics officer.
ALPHA humanoid. The flagship product is ALPHA (expanded on the site as Automated Large Processing Humanoid Assistant, and elsewhere as Automated Litter Processing Humanoid Assistant), a wheeled dual-arm humanoid that stands in a sorting position on a conveyor line. According to the official specification, it has a chest with two 6-DOF arms fitted with grippers that together lift up to 5 kg, a 2-DOF head with a binocular depth camera, a 3D arm camera (85 x 58 degree field of view, 0.25 to 2.5 m depth range), and a lifting column with 1 m of travel that raises the arms to a 2,000 mm maximum working height at up to 150 mm/s. The autonomous mobile base handles navigation, mapping, obstacle avoidance and automatic charging using lidar, a depth camera, ultrasonic sensors and an IMU. Compute is an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin rated at 275 TOPS. The robot runs up to 7 hours and charges in 3. TeknTrash says ALPHA uses hyperspectral cameras that see beyond the visible spectrum, grippers rather than suction cups, cloud coordination in teams of at least two units fed by a camera at the start of the conveyor, and a target sorting rate of 42 picks per minute, compared with 30 to 40 for human pickers. BBC reporting in May 2026 said the ALPHA hardware is built by China's RealMan Robotics and adapted by TeknTrash for recycling work.
Training data. TeknTrash trains ALPHA with its own HoloLab data-capture software. At Sharp Group's recycling plant in Rainham, East London, which handles about 2,800 tonnes of waste a week, sorting operatives wear Meta Quest 3 headsets that record finger positions and what they see while picking recyclables. The data goes to Google Cloud and is converted to LeRobot format for policy training and inference with NVIDIA Isaac GR00T. The pilot was announced with Sharp Group in 2025; press reports in May 2026 described ALPHA as still in training rather than in full production use. HoloLab also serves as the monitoring and remote-control portal for deployed robots.
Other systems and business model. At Sacyr's tyre recycling plant near Madrid, which takes about 20,000 tonnes of used tyres a year, TeknTrash installed four 24/7 industrial cameras with a YOLO-based model that detects stray steel cutter teeth and signals the plant's IoT control to stop the shredder before damage occurs. Its P.O.D. (Point of Disposal) smart-bin network uses AI and fill-level sensors, and the company has open-sourced its smart-bin technology on GitHub. ALPHA is offered as robots-as-a-service: a GBP 50,000 implementation fee, a 12-month maturity period with no operating fees, then a monthly fee equal to the salary cost of the worker it replaces or supports. A start-up database lists a US$530K seed round in August 2022 with Google, Microsoft and angel investors.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
ALPHA
Wheeled dual-arm humanoid for recycling-line sorting with hyperspectral and depth vision, lifting column and Jetson AGX Orin, trained on VR-captured picker data.
HoloLab
Meta Quest 3 based capture of operators' finger motion and vision, uploaded to Google Cloud in LeRobot format to train ALPHA; also robot monitoring portal.
Metal contamination detection camera system
Four 24/7 industrial cameras with YOLO-based detection that stop a tyre shredder via IoT when stray steel teeth are spotted; deployed at Sacyr, Madrid.
More related news
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
-
18
A3 Humanoid Robot Forum 2027 – Las Vegas, May 11–12 RobotToday · Oct 14, 2026
-
19
Humanoids Summit SV 2026 – San Mateo, Dec 1–2, 2026 RobotToday · Oct 14, 2026
-
20
EMEA Humanoid Robot Summit 2027 – Munich, Apr 13–14 RobotToday · Oct 14, 2026
Contact TeknTrash Robotics
WEBSITE
https://tekntrash.comHEADQUARTERS
United Kingdom
Company Facts
Founded
-
Primary Role
System Integrator
Company Size
-
Primary Region
Europe
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- TeknTrash Robotics
- TeknTrash
- Synthetic Data Inc Ltd
- TeknTrash Inc.
- waste sorting humanoid
- ALPHA
- HoloLab
- VR teleoperation data
- hyperspectral camera
- Isaac GR00T
- LeRobot
- smart bin
- tyre recycling vision
- robots as a service
- System Integrator
- Software/Algorithm
- RaaS
- Service Company
- Humanoid
- Mobile Manipulator
