A scrappy materials science startup is solving one of fashion's sustainability problems with an unlikely solution: turning poultry feathers and textile waste into cashmere-grade fiber using AI. Everbloom, which just announced it's raised over $8 million from investors including Hoxton Ventures and SOSV, has built a machine learning model that fine-tunes the molecular parameters of waste keratin to replicate everything from polyester to luxury cashmere. The breakthrough could reshape how the textile industry sources materials while finally breaking the 'sustainable premium' pricing model.
The cashmere sweater crisis is quietly unfolding in global fashion. You've probably seen it - premium-feeling cashmere at $50 a pop, flooding fast-fashion retailers and department stores. The problem is real, and it's brutal for the goat herds that actually produce the stuff.
One goat will get sheared twice a year, yielding maybe four to six ounces of cashmere total. That's the honest math. But when demand exploded and prices plummeted, herders started shearing more aggressively, more often. The fiber quality tanked. The sustainability went out the window. "The producers of raw materials are actually under a lot of stress," Sim Gulati, co-founder and CEO of Everbloom, told TechCrunch. "What you're seeing now, especially with the advent of $50 cashmere sweaters, is that they're being sheared way more often. The quality of the fiber is not as good, and it's creating unsustainable herding practices."
Rather than lecture consumers about sustainability or shame fast-fashion brands, Gulati and his team decided to go a different direction entirely. Instead of defending natural cashmere supply chains, they'd build a replacement so good nobody could tell the difference. That's where Braid.AI comes in.
The AI model is essentially a tuning instrument for fiber architecture. Feed it parameters about what you want to create - softness profile, weight, thermal properties, strength - and it tells you exactly how to manipulate the starting material and process conditions to get there. The starting material? Waste. Lots of it.
Everbloom currently collects waste fibers from cashmere and wool farms, textile mills, and down bedding suppliers. The company plans to expand to feathers from poultry processing, which is where the headline gets its punch. All these waste streams share one crucial thing: they're made of keratin, the same protein that makes cashmere cashmere. It's all the same building block, just waiting to be reshaped.
Here's where the engineering gets elegant. The waste gets chopped up and mixed with proprietary compounds. That mixture gets forced through an extrusion machine - basically the same equipment that shapes plastic pellets. Those pellets then run through spinning machines that already exist on factory floors everywhere. "That equipment is used for 80% of the textile market," Gulati said. "You have to be a drop in replacement."
