Co-Founder & CEO • Glacier • San Francisco, CA
Teaching robots to sort trash. Turning 3.8 billion images of America's discarded packaging into a working circular economy.
When Rebecca Hu-Thrams and her co-founder Areeb Malik installed Glacier's first recycling robot, they worked 20 straight hours through a weekend. When the machine finally came online, they grabbed a marker and wrote "Glacier Tech Support" on the side of the unit - along with Areeb's personal cell phone number. That detail says everything about where they were starting from.
Now Glacier is in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, and Seattle. Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund has a stake. New Enterprise Associates has a stake. Colgate-Palmolive is paying Glacier to track what actually happens to its squeeze tubes. And Rebecca is pitching a number that sounds modest but lands hard: just 2% market penetration puts Glacier at $1 billion in revenue.
"MRF managers show up to work, turn on the lights, and hold their breath and wait to see what new, crazy things come down their conveyor lines."- Rebecca Hu-Thrams, on the daily reality inside American recycling facilities
The company she runs, Glacier, operates at what she calls "the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet." Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are places where human sorters stand at conveyor belts, pulling recyclable items from a chaotic stream of mixed waste. The turnover rate is so severe that facilities hire the same position five times a year. And because those humans cannot reliably distinguish between a recyclable plastic type 1 and a type 5, or identify a toothpaste tube by composition, roughly 50% of all U.S. recyclables still end up in landfills.
Glacier's AI-powered robotic arms don't call in sick. They don't quit. And unlike their human counterparts, they process up to 60 picks per minute while identifying over 70 different material categories - including the specific brand and composition of individual packaging items - with accuracy above 90%.
The AI was trained on more than 3.8 billion images of waste. That is not a typo.
"Would you rather stand at a conveyor belt and sort through people's trash, or lift boxes in a warehouse?"- Rebecca Hu-Thrams, on why recycling facilities can't hold onto their workforce
Before Glacier, Rebecca ran category businesses at Thumbtack (think: the Events, Wellness, and Pets verticals, 2015-2018) after cutting her teeth at Bain & Company. She graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College - and she is a first-generation American, daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose household ran on a simple mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle.
That domestic discipline grew into something much larger. What Glacier is really building is not just a better sorting arm - it's the data infrastructure that makes Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws actually work. When a state law now requires Colgate to report how many of its squeeze tubes get recycled (not just labeled "recyclable"), Glacier is the system that generates that number. The company's robots don't only sort; they track, verify, and report in real time. Brands are paying for that transparency. Recycling facilities are buying it as a labor replacement. And regulators are starting to rely on it.
In April 2025, Glacier closed a $16 million Series A extension led by the Ecosystem Integrity Fund, with participation from Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, NEA, AlleyCorp, and several others. Total funding reached $33.2 million. The company now employs 110 people. The robots serve the recycling needs of nearly 1 in 10 American households.
Fast Company named Glacier the #1 Most Innovative Company in Robotics & Engineering for 2026. TIME named the robots one of the Best Inventions of 2025. Waste360 put Rebecca on its 40 Under 40 list. The RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award came in 2024. She has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival. She has been featured on CBS, NBC, Fortune, Axios, and TechCrunch.
The aspiration is clear and she says it plainly: producers should be making things designed to be easy to recycle. Until that day arrives, Glacier's robots will be on the conveyor belts, picking.
Half of America's recyclables go to landfill. Not because people are lazy - because the sorting process at scale is genuinely impossible to do well with human hands. A glass bottle, a black plastic container, an aseptic juice box: to the eye, at speed, on a conveyor belt, the distinctions blur. To Glacier's computer vision, trained on nearly four billion real-world images, they are entirely distinct objects.
Each robot Glacier deploys prevents roughly 10 million items per year from reaching a landfill. The cost per pick is less than half of what existing methods charge. That math - plus the labor crisis in MRFs, plus the incoming EPR regulatory wave - is what turned Glacier from a weekend hack into a venture-backed company with Amazon money and Fortune 500 partnerships.
"If we achieved just under 2% penetration in our addressable market, we would already be at $1B in revenue."
- Rebecca Hu-ThramsGlacier was not born in a Stanford class or a Y Combinator batch. It was born from the specific frustration of watching a critical industrial system - American recycling - fail in plain sight while everyone shrugged. Rebecca met Areeb Malik, a former Meta software and AI engineer, and together they saw a match: the robotics and computer vision that Amazon uses in its fulfillment centers, applied to the messiest possible manufacturing problem.
The first robot required 20 hours of continuous work to bring online. They wrote a cell phone number on the side as tech support. That phone number is now a footnote in a company that has partnerships with Recology, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola, AB InBev, and Unilever - and has a commercial pilot running inside Amazon's own logistics ecosystem.
Glacier's funding story runs from a $4.5M seed to a $16M Series A extension in three years - with Amazon, NEA, and a growing roster of climate-focused funds.
Across seed + Series A + extension
NEA, Amazon, AlleyCorp, EIF, Cox Exponential, and more
2022 seed to 2025 extension
Backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund
Most Innovative Company in Robotics & Engineering, 2026. The top slot in a category dominated by hardware giants.
Named one of the best inventions of 2025 - in a list that spans medicine, consumer tech, and climate solutions.
Recognized as one of the next generation of leaders transforming the waste and recycling industry.
Won the RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award in 2024 for breakthrough robotic applications.
Secured investment from Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, plus a commercial pilot program inside Amazon's logistics network.
Invited to speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival - one of the most selective speaking forums in the country.
"MRF managers show up to work, turn on the lights, and hold their breath and wait to see what new, crazy things come down their conveyor lines."
"Would you rather stand at a conveyor belt and sort through people's trash, or lift boxes in a warehouse?"
"What I hope is true for recycling in the coming years is that producers are making things designed to be really easy to recycle."
"If we achieved just under 2% penetration in our addressable market, we would already be at $1B in revenue."
"As a founder I spend 99% of my time looking at [problems]."
"We're applying cutting-edge technology to what I call 'the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.'"
A consulting pedigree, a stint scaling a marketplace, and then a robot with a cell phone number on the side.
Glacier runs a full-stack AI operation - from cloud infrastructure to robotic hardware to data visualization dashboards that brands and regulators actually use.
From global CPG brands paying for recycling data, to major MRF operators deploying the robots at scale.
Glacier's AI was trained on 3.8 billion real images of waste - more than most social networks process in a day
Accurate enough to identify a Colgate toothpaste tube by composition, not just shape
MRFs hire the same sorting position five times per year. Glacier's robots don't quit.
Continuous work to bring the first Glacier robot online. Areeb's cell number went on the side as "tech support."
Half of all U.S. recyclables currently end up in landfills. That's the market Glacier is attacking.
Glacier's cost per pick is less than half of existing recycling automation methods