Circular Fashion
Since 2022, eBay's Circular Fashion Fund has backed more than 25 companies working to make fashion circular. Silhouet is one of eight finalists in the 2026 cohort. Here is what the fund is, how it has changed, and who the other seven are.
eBay launched the fund in 2022 with the British Fashion Council, a 100,000 pound pot for UK startups working on circularity. It has since expanded to the United States, Germany, and Australia, run alongside the CFDA, Fashion Council Germany, and the Australian Fashion Council, and has backed more than 25 companies with over $1.2M committed by the end of 2025. The framing has stayed consistent: back the businesses turning circularity from ambition into action, across the industry's footprint from production through end-of-life.
For 2026, more than 1,300 companies applied. Twenty-four were shortlisted and eight were selected as finalists, each receiving a $50K grant, a month of workshops and one-on-one mentoring with eBay's team, and access to its network. The finalists pitched at the eBay Fashion Forum in New York, hosted with Vogue Business, where one company was named Global Winner with the opportunity for a $300K investment from eBay Ventures. Vogue covered the result.
The judges: Alexis Hoopes (VP Fashion, eBay), Henri Jaanimagi (Head of eBay Ventures), Federica Marchionni (CEO, Global Fashion Agenda), Laird Borrelli-Persson (Senior Archive Editor, Vogue), Joe Murphy (Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Ellen MacArthur Foundation), Indre Rockefeller (Founder and CEO, The Circularity Project), and Peter Whitcomb (CEO, Tersus).
The fund's emphasis has moved over four years. Early cohorts leaned toward consumer-facing ideas, the rental and swap and resale apps betting on behavior change. Recent ones lean toward infrastructure, the tools that let brands and operators work differently without rebuilding from scratch. Refiberd, the 2025 global winner, reads fiber composition with hyperspectral imaging. Trosort, this year's, sorts textiles by machine. That is the same logic that puts a production-software company in the room.
Because most of fashion's waste does not happen at end of life. It happens upstream, in failed samples, wrong production runs, and the roughly one third of everything made that never sells. By the time a garment reaches a resale rack or a recycling line, most of the damage is already done.
That is the make side, and it is where Silhouet works. When the spec is right the first time, sample rounds do not multiply. When a run is sized to real demand instead of guesswork, the unsold third shrinks. The honest part is that it works whether or not a brand cares about sustainability, because getting production right saves money first. Sustainability that depends on goodwill does not scale. Sustainability that is also cheaper does.
Trosort, the 2026 Global Winner, builds AI-powered textile sorting automation for reuse and recycling. Its system identifies brand, defects, and composition in a single pass, so secondhand operations can process garments at industrial speed instead of by hand.
Circular Sourcing is an Australian marketplace for surplus and designer deadstock fabric, built by the team behind A.BCH. Quality textiles that would otherwise sit in storage or go to landfill get a second run in new collections.
Refabric is a generative AI design assistant for fashion. Designers and brands turn sketches and mood boards into developed designs, with models trained on their own look, fabrics, and patterns.
It Goes Forward is the team behind Forwarding, turning customer returns into an efficient pathway to resale instead of a write-off.
Ragpiq is a Melbourne-built marketplace that connects people who want to offload secondhand clothes with vetted local resellers who handle the entire selling process, with AI that identifies and values items from a photo.
TRUSS builds automated pricing intelligence for secondhand fashion. Resale pricing is one of the quiet bottlenecks of circularity, since every item is unique, so TRUSS prices from real sales data across resale platforms and shows its confidence in every number.
eComID is building a shopping passport that gives online shopping memory, helping retailers cut returns before they happen and smoothing the path from purchase to resale.
And then there is us. Silhouet is design-to-production software for emerging fashion brands, working the make side. The AI drafts a factory-ready tech pack from a Shopify catalog or a sketch, and a readiness check catches the gaps that cause wasted samples.
The $50K grant goes where it compounds: onboarding the beta cohort and building the software that gets production right the first time. The bigger prize is the company we get to keep: seven other teams, same industry, different angles and different geographies, all trading notes on how fashion actually becomes circular.
Congratulations to Trosort on the win. If the industry is going to sort, resell, and recirculate clothing at scale, machines that can read a garment in one pass are a very good place to start.
A program from eBay that backs early companies advancing circular fashion. The 2026 edition selected eight finalists globally, each receiving a $50K grant, mentoring, and access to eBay's network, with one Global Winner eligible for a $300K investment from eBay Ventures.
The eight finalists are Circular Sourcing, eComID, It Goes Forward, Ragpiq, Refabric, Silhouet, Trosort, and TRUSS. Trosort, an AI textile sorting company, was named the 2026 Global Winner.
Silhouet works on fashion's upstream waste. Most of the industry's waste comes from failed samples, wrong production runs, and inventory that never sells. Silhouet's AI-native production software gets the spec and the run right the first time, which cuts that waste at the source.
Silhouet is design-to-production software for emerging fashion brands. Brands sync a Shopify catalog or start from a sketch, and the AI drafts a factory-ready tech pack with a readiness check before it ships to a factory. Free to start during beta.
Silhouet takes emerging fashion brands from an idea to a factory-ready product, with less wasted sampling along the way. Free to start during beta.