DePoly ranks second at the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025

Cleantech startup DePoly was founded in 2020 by Samantha Anderson (CEO), Bardiya Valizadeh (CTO), and Christopher Ireland (CSO) close the loop on PET plastic recycling. From plastic waste to raw material source brings them the second place at the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025.

For the 15th time, a jury of 100 investors and technology experts has selected the 100 most promising startups in Switzerland. DePoly takes second place in the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025. The project idea started in 2019 with the support of Venture Kick. Five years later the company employs over 30 people and shows that plastic can also be circular.

DePoly is ahead in the recycling technology race
Switzerland has one of the highest per capita plastic consumption rates in the world. A staggering 120 kg of plastic is used annually per person—from biscuit packaging and credit cards to the elastane in sportswear. Producing this amount of plastic requires the equivalent of more than 190 liters of crude oil.

Efforts are underway at the political level to ensure that plastics must be either reusable or at least recyclable in the future, so that some of the plastic produced remains in circulation. Currently, this is true for barely 10% of plastic waste.

Establishing a comprehensive logistics system for plastic collection may be the easier part of the equation. The real challenge begins afterward: what to do with the mountains of plastic collected locally. Plastic is far from homogeneous – industries use around 20 different types, including PET, polypropylene, and polyethylene. Current recycling methods require this waste to be laboriously sorted before processing. For DePoly founder Samantha Anderson, one thing is clear: “This is not a long-term solution.”

Several players around the world are working to solve this problem more efficiently, including the Sion-based startup. The EPFL spin-off has developed a patented process that chemically breaks down unsorted plastic waste into monomers at room temperature.

Anderson and her co-founders, Christopher Ireland, and Bardiya Valizadeh, have demonstrated that their process works on a small scale. Now comes the next major step: the team is completing an industrial demonstration plant in Monthey. After commissioning, planned for autumn 2025, the facility will be gradually scaled up to process 500 tonnes of plastic annually.

DePoly has already signed several purchase agreements for the monomers produced, effectively closing the loop. “This is crucial, as it is the only way we can establish our process as the de facto standard,” explains Anderson. Because no matter how sophisticated a solution may be, only those that reach major customers first will survive in this global competition.

The cleantech startup received an additional boost this spring with a CHF 8 million extension of its 2023 seed round, bringing it to a total of USD 23 million. The new capital, provided by US venture capital firm MassMutual Ventures, will be used to plan and build DePoly’s first commercial plants. Unlike the demo facility, these large-scale plants will be built in the EU, Asia, and the US. “MassMutual gives us access to its strong network in North America, which will be a great help when we launch there,” says Anderson.

At its current pace, DePoly could be converting 50,000 to 100,000 tonnes of plastic waste into monomers annually by 2027. While Switzerland alone generates significantly more plastic waste each year, this would still mark a major improvement within a relatively
short time.

Jordi Montserrat (Venturelab) and Samantha Anderson (DePoly)

This article by Fabienne Roos was first published in the Top100 Swiss Startup Magazine 2025.