Ganiga will showcase its waste-sorting robots at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Summary

Despite the well-known environmental benefits of recycling, it’s estimated that less than 10% of the world’s plastic gets recycled. Ganiga Innovation looks to bring that percentage up using AI-enabled robotic waste bins. Italian startup Ganiga built three products to help better manage waste and recycling. The first is a fleet of robotic waste bins, called Hoooly, that use generative AI to determine what is trash and what is recycling and sort the waste accordingly. The second is a smart lid that can be fitted to existing waste bins with the same functionality as its larger bin counterpart. The company also has a software product that allows companies to track the waste they produce; it offers suggestions for how a company can reduce waste production based on its waste data. Ganiga will be showing off its tech as part of this year’s Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, which runs October 27 to 29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Nicolas Zeoli, the founder and CEO of Ganiga, told TechCrunch that he’s had dreams of building the next great company, like Facebook or Apple, since he was younger. He decided to focus on waste because he said issues surrounding waste management are very tangible in his native Italy — and it was clear there wasn’t much being done about it. “We all need to reclaim this problem,” Zeoli said. “I read 100 articles on this problem. For example, in one year, only in one year, in the whole world over 100 million tons of plastic is created and only 9% is recycled. This is a very real problem.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 Zeoli launched Ganiga in 2021 and built its first prototype in 2022. Zeoli said they decided to focus on building a bin to solve this problem because it gives people a physical place to put waste that can ensure it gets properly recycled and sorted, and because the bins spit out data that can be used for the future. Waste management is also expensive for companies, Zeoli said. Many org...