Revise Robotics wants to give your dead laptop a second life

Walk onto the floor of an electronics recycling facility and you will find the same quiet arithmetic playing out on every pallet. A laptop arrives. Someone has to decide, quickly, whether it is worth saving. If it is, a person tests it, wipes the drive, snaps a few photos, and writes a listing. If that takes too long - and it usually does - the machine gets shredded for scrap instead. Multiply that decision by the tens of millions of computers Americans throw out each year, and you get the central problem Revise Robotics was built to solve.

The New York company, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, builds AI-enabled robotic systems that handle that entire refurbishment pipeline without a human standing over it. The pitch is unusually literal: a robot tests a laptop, wipes its hard drive, photographs it, and posts it to online marketplaces for resale. It does this regardless of model, manufacturer, or operating system, and it is designed to get through hundreds of devices a day.

01 / THE PROBLEMThe bottleneck was never the technology

It is tempting to file e-waste under "materials problem" - rare metals, toxic components, landfill leakage. Revise Robotics reframes it as a labor problem. The devices that end up crushed are not always broken. Many of them work. They get discarded because the manual steps required to prepare them for resale - inspection, data-wiping, reprogramming, packaging - are slow, repetitive, and expensive enough that refurbishment loses the race against the shredder.

That $50 billion figure is the part that reframes everything. It is not the cost of the problem - it is the value sitting on the table, unclaimed, because getting it out has always required more human hours than it returns. Close that gap and reuse stops being charity. It becomes the cheaper option.

02 / THE PRODUCTFour steps, done the same way every time

The elegance of the system is that it does not try to be clever about any single laptop. It is clever about the pile. A recycler's inbound stream is chaos - a Dell here, an old MacBook there, a Chromebook with a dead battery, a machine nobody can identify. Human refurbishment slows down precisely because every device is a small research project. Revise Robotics designed for the mess rather than around it, running the same repeatable sequence no matter what lands in front of the arm.

Because the pipeline is model-agnostic, the throughput does not collapse when the pallet gets weird. That is the whole bet. A facility that could clear a few dozen laptops a day by hand can, in theory, clear hundreds when the robot handles the tedium and a person handles only the exceptions.

03 / THE CUSTOMERBuilt for the loading dock, not the showroom

Revise Robotics does not sell to consumers - at least not primarily. Its systems are meant to slot into the businesses already sitting on mountains of used hardware: e-waste recycling facilities and IT asset disposition (ITAD) companies. These are the operators who receive corporate fleets at end-of-life, the pallets of returned and retired machines that have to go somewhere. For them, every laptop diverted from the shredder and turned into a listing is recovered value and a smaller pile to dispose of.

That B2B focus also explains why data-wiping sits so prominently in the pipeline. An ITAD's entire reputation rests on the promise that no former owner's files walk out the door. Automating sanitization at machine speed is not a convenience feature here. It is the price of entry.

04 / THE FOUNDERSA cousin, a refurbished PC, and a company

Revise Robotics was founded in 2024 by Rupesh Jeyaram, the CEO, and Antonio Monreal, the CTO. The origin story that keeps surfacing is Monreal's. His cousin refurbished electronics in Mexico, and that work put technology into his hands - technology that opened the door to an education and, eventually, a career designing electronics devices in the Bay Area. The company is, in a sense, that family business rebuilt at industrial scale, with the manual labor swapped for robotics.

The pairing is deliberate. Monreal brings the hardware and electronics-design instinct; Jeyaram runs the company and its commercial side. They launched publicly through YC in January 2025, having already completed a first pilot the month before, and have since reported a $3.6 million seed round to push the systems into more facilities.

05 / THE MARKETReuse over recycling

Most climate money in electronics has historically chased recycling - the recovery of raw materials from devices that are already destroyed. Revise Robotics sits one step upstream, in the more valuable and more neglected territory of reuse. A working laptop resold is worth far more than the copper and gold you can extract by grinding it up, and it avoids the emissions of manufacturing a replacement. The competition, then, is not really other robotics startups. It is the status quo: in-house manual refurbishment teams and the ever-present temptation to shred.

What makes the approach hard to copy is not any single robotic motion. It is the willingness to handle heterogeneity - to build a system that shrugs at an unfamiliar model instead of stalling on it. Do that reliably, and you change the economics of an entire industry's default decision.

06 / WHAT'S NEXTStarting with laptops

"Starting with laptops" is doing quiet work in every description of the company. Laptops are the wedge: high enough in value to justify refurbishment, standardized enough in form to automate, and discarded in enormous numbers. But the underlying capability - a robot that can assess, sanitize, document, and list a used device - points at a much larger category of consumer electronics. If the laptop pipeline holds up across enough facilities, the same playbook extends outward from there.

For now, the company is small, technical, and pointed at a single, concrete metric: how many devices a day can be pulled back from the landfill and put back into circulation. It is an unglamorous number. It is also, more or less, the whole point.