Smartex: Using AI to cut Textile Supply Chain Waste
Gilberto Loureiro’s teenage work inspecting fabric in a Portuguese textile factory was the foundation for a startup tackling waste and supply chain sustainability in fashion manufacturing.
That early experience – defined by Gilberto as a “hate and love” relationship with the process – shaped his vision for Smartex, the company he co-founded after earning a physics master’s degree.
Today, Smartex uses AI, vision software and high-spec cameras to detect textile defects automatically.
This reduces the volume of wasted material flowing through fashion supply chains, while also aiming to eliminate the physical toll and inefficiencies of manual inspection.
Gilberto explains: "I really love the textile industry and problem solving, but I hate this … inspection working and inefficiencies and the waste. It's really one of the most difficult jobs in the world."
Waste reduction in the global fashion supply chain
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a circular economy non-profit, reports that the fashion industry discards one truckload of clothes every second through either burning or landfill.
Smartex is targeting this issue from within the production line itself, embedding inspection technology into the earliest stages of garment creation.
Smartex’s system enables the production of 0.37% more garments per kilogramme of fabric by identifying defects early. While that margin might appear small, it carries major implications at scale.
In 2024, Inditex – owner of brands including Zara – used 678,596 tonnes of raw materials. Applied across such volumes, the savings in fabric alone are substantial.
Over three years, Smartex says it has prevented one million kilogrammes of fabric from being wasted.
For supply chain leaders in the fashion sector, these numbers show how upstream improvements in inspection accuracy can create tangible downstream efficiencies, cutting unnecessary production and associated logistics costs.
Securing investment for industry change
Despite fashion’s global scale, the sector has been slow to adopt digital solutions. Gilberto highlights the gap: "If this is the largest industry that is still untouched by [the] internet and is one of the largest pollutants in the world, and nobody is working on this in terms of technology [then] there is a massive gap here."
This unfilled space has helped Smartex attract backing from major investors.
Tony Fadell, inventor of the iPod, led a $24.7m funding round in 2022 through Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The same year, H&M Group also invested. The fashion giant said in a related statement: “Their vision of enabling industries around the world to produce with significantly less waste aligns perfectly with H&M Group’s own commitment of leading the change to a better fashion future.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also supporting Smartex through its Compute for Climate Fellowship programme.
The partnership provides computing power and technical expertise, enabling faster development of AI capabilities.
“Climate tech startups, they have so much R&D that they need to do, maybe even more than standard tech companies, they have to invent new science or new technology, as well as new business models,” explains Lisbeth Kaufman, AWS Head of Climate Tech Business Development.
Proving value in competitive supply chains
Smartex is now focused on demonstrating rapid ROI to factories in textile hubs such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.
In these high-pressure environments, factory owners assess investments with urgency. “If in 30 seconds he's not convinced about the ROI, in less than one year, for example, you are out of the game,” says Gilberto.
Factory investments are not made lightly. Estimates from the Apparel Impact Institute suggest payback periods for new production technology range from nine to 18 months.
To secure commitments, Smartex must prove savings across electricity use, yarn consumption and waste reduction – all core concerns for supply chain decision-makers.
Gilberto’s long-term vision is to integrate Smartex systems as the digital layer for textile production, where data flows from machine to brand in real time.
This would allow companies to trace raw material origins, map production steps and monitor resource use such as water – insights that remain elusive for many today. "These are basic questions that are very difficult or impossible to answer by most fashion brands," Gilberto affirms.
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