Tricia Carey joins “low-carbon” crop startup Avalo

Key takeaways

• The fashion veteran brings decades of apparel and fiber expertise to Avalo’s AI-driven mission to breed better cotton.
• Industry peers have credited her with efforts to advance circulose, textile-to-textile recycled material from doomed startup Renewcell.
• Carey spent 24 years at fiber giant Lenzing Group, where she led denim strategy and expanded the use of Tencel.

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Tricia Carey, a veteran of sustainability innovation in apparel, is joining a six-year-old startup that seeks to accelerate the evolution of climate-friendly cotton. As the new chief commercial officer for AI-focused Avalo, she will help develop irrigation-free cotton plants that use 30 percent less fertilizer than conventional methods.

Carey will help the Durham, North Carolina, company expand a two-year effort in Texas to discover “low-input” cotton strains that require fewer chemical applications than when conventionally grown. 

Carey brings deep experience in fiber and textile development, honed over more than two decades at Lenzing Group. In the late 1990s, she helped usher the company’s new semisynthetic fiber, Tencel into supply chains for brands including Gap, Levi’s and UnderArmour. She worked her way up to become director of business development for denim and the Americas.

More recently, Carey attracted a mix of sympathy and criticism in her nearly two years as the chief commercial officer of Renewcell, which she left last July. The promising Stockholm circularity startup recycled old cotton jeans and T-shirts into material to be blended and spun into new clothes. H&M, Zara and Levi’s featured the product in capsule collections. Due to a mix of bad timing, failure of purchasers to honor agreements and the pressures of a newly public company, Circulose filed for bankruptcy. However, its product, circulose, lives on in a new namesake company and in mainstream clothes by Reformation and others.

Carey has held numerous leadership roles at fashion sustainability groups, including Textile Exchange and the Fashion Impact Fund. She sits on the boards of Accelerating Circularity and the Transformers Foundation, of which she is also a member.

“I’m thrilled to join Avalo and be part of an exceptional team that’s pioneering innovative solutions at the intersection of agriculture, technology, and textiles,” Carey said in a press release. “Avalo’s machine-learning platform accelerates plant evolution in a ground-breaking new way, enabling us to bring more sustainable and efficient products to market faster and cheaper than ever before – which allows us to better keep pace with the agricultural challenges we’re facing.”

Avalo’s vision of “low-input,” low-carbon cotton

“We’re so excited to have Tricia on board who has brought industry changing innovation to the textile world,”  Avalo CEO Brendan Collins said in a press statement. “That said, her experience as a strategist, supply-chain connector and coalition builder will help us bring similar innovation to other industries that desperately need it.”

The machine learning startup hopes to rapidly produce and popularize crops that weather droughts and other conditions amplified by the climate crisis. The company’s “discovery engine” pinpoints the genetic basis for specific crop traits, then uses its findings to make quick, accurate simulations and predictions. Avalo doesn’t make genetic modified organisms; it finds ways to breed more plants that use fewer resources and chemical inputs.

Fashion loves cotton, its second most utilized fabric. But so do aphids and bollworms. Worldwide, cotton is responsible for roughly 10 percent of pesticide use and 2.5 percent of global use of farm-worthy land, according to the Pesticide Action Network. The crop also guzzles 3 percent of all water used in agriculture, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.

Only 2 percent of global cotton is grown with organic, traceability standards, such as the Better Cotton Initiative.

Avalo is also working on other low-carbon commodities, including rice and rubber. Its sugarcane efforts nabbed a partnership in March with CocaCola Europacific Partners (CCEP).

The company just raised most of its $14.9 million in funding in March, with a Series A round of $11 million led by Alexandria Venture Investments and Germin8 Ventures.

Threads of AI and fibers

Carey recently advised FibreTrace, another AI technology bid involving apparel materials. It enables end products to be traced to their origins by embedding a nontoxic, pigment-based identification marker in raw fibers. She recently described the growth in tech-focused companies boosting materials traceability and transparency as part of a generational shift in the industry. “You need someone to make sure it’s being applied properly, so you need your IT person but you also need a textile technologist,” she told California Apparel News last week.

It sounds like Avalo was listening.

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