Recycleye has been acquired by CP Group in a deal that pushes AI-based sorting further into the core of material recovery facility design, rather than leaving it as a specialist layer added later. CP Group has taken a majority stake in the London company, folding Recycleye’s vision and robotic sorting technology into a business that has spent decades designing, building, and integrating MRF systems at scale.
For Recycleye, founded in 2019 and built around AI-driven detection and robotic picking of mixed recyclables, the transaction marks a shift from fast-growth specialist to part of a full-line plant supplier. For CP Group, it sharpens a strategy that was already moving in that direction. The US group had previously incorporated Recycleye-powered AI into its sorting offer, positioning deep-learning classification alongside more established optical and mechanical systems. Ownership gives it tighter control over product development, alignment, and rollout.
That matters because plant operators are increasingly buying for performance at system level, not just for one machine. Recycleye’s technology combines proprietary AI vision with FANUC industrial robots, including LR Mate units and iRPickTool-based visual tracking, to automate detection and extraction tasks that still rely heavily on labour in many facilities. The company says the system can raise sorting accuracy by up to 12 percent and improve line output by up to 10 percent, which is the sort of incremental gain that quickly becomes material when labour availability is thin and commodity margins are unforgiving.
Terry Schneider, Chief Executive Officer of CP Group, said: “This acquisition brings together the industry’s leading MRF integrator with Europe’s most established AI-based sorting company. Together, we are advancing AI-enabled sorting and plant control across the entire MRF — from maximizing material purity to reducing operating costs.”
The industrial significance goes beyond robotic picks per minute. AI sorting is becoming part of how MRFs are controlled, tuned, and commercialised, with operators looking for better purity, more stable throughput, stronger reporting, and data that can expose what is actually moving down the belt. CP Group’s own Vivid AI offer, powered by Recycleye, already framed AI as a complement to conventional NIR optical sorting. Bringing the underlying AI company inside the group suggests that distinction is starting to dissolve.
FANUC’s role in Recycleye’s rise also highlights another pattern: the industrial robot suppliers that backed early waste-tech entrants are now seeing those platforms absorbed into larger plant and systems businesses. Recycleye won a FANUC Global Partner Award for Innovation in 2024, and FANUC UK said it had supported the company commercially and technically from its startup phase through to the transaction.
The next phase will be watched closely across the sector. Waste operators want fewer manual touches, better recovery economics, and more reliable plant data, while equipment groups want a stronger claim over the entire automation stack. This deal serves both ends of that logic.
