Circular Fashion
The 2026 eBay Circular Fashion Fund, and the eight companies in it.
Since 2022, eBay's Circular Fashion Fund has backed more than 30 businesses 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.
What the eBay Circular Fashion Fund is
eBay launched the Circular Fashion Fund in the UK in 2022 with the British Fashion Council, a £100,000 pot for startups working on circularity. It reached Australia in 2023 and the United States and Germany after that, run alongside the Australian Fashion Council, the CFDA, and Fashion Council Germany, and has now backed more than 30 businesses. eBay's framing has stayed consistent, backing the companies it says are turning circularity from ambition into action, across the industry's footprint from production through end-of-life.
For 2026, twenty-four applicants 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, supported by Vogue Business, where one company was named Global Winner with the opportunity for a $300K investment from eBay Ventures. Vogue Business covered the result.
The judges: Alexis Hoopes (Vice President and Global Head of Fashion, eBay), Henri Jaanimägi (Global Head of eBay Ventures), Federica Marchionni (CEO, Global Fashion Agenda), Laird Borrelli-Persson (Senior Archive Editor, Vogue), Joe Murphy (then Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, now interim CEO, Ellen MacArthur Foundation), Indré Rockefeller (Founder, The Circularity Project), and Peter Whitcomb (CEO, Tersus Solutions).
Pedro Rabelo Guerra, Fashion Lead at eBay, and Kate Danielsen, Strategic Partnerships Manager, were central to running the program, alongside the wider eBay team and the coaches and mentors who showed up for us throughout the month. The workshops and the one-on-one sessions turned out to be the part I valued most.
The eight finalists for 2026
The 2026 finalists are Circular Sourcing, eComID, It Goes Forward, Ragpiq, Refabric, Silhouet, Trosort, and TRUSS. Trosort was named Global Winner.
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, founded by Courtney Holm of Melbourne label A.BCH after she ran into how hard circular raw materials are to find. Quality textiles that would otherwise sit in storage get another route into new collections.
Refabric is a generative AI design assistant for fashion. Designers and brands turn sketches and mood boards into developed designs, with the AI trained on their own look, fabrics, and patterns.
It Goes Forward is a Rotterdam company whose product, Forwarding, reroutes an online return straight to the next customer who wants that item, skipping the warehouse trip and the repackaging entirely.
Ragpiq is a Melbourne-built consignment marketplace that connects people who want to offload secondhand clothes with vetted local resellers who handle the listing and selling, with AI that reads an item from a photo and recommends what to price it at.
TRUSS builds automated pricing intelligence for secondhand fashion, taking on the hard problem of pricing unique items consistently. It prices from real sales data across resale platforms and shows its confidence in every number.
eComID is building a shopping passport for the internet, a profile that carries a shopper's size, fit, and preferences across brands so retailers can personalize what they show and cut returns before they happen.
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 flags the gaps a factory would otherwise send back.
Why a production-software company sits in a circularity cohort
My read is that the center of gravity has shifted. Compared with the consumer-platform-heavy 2024 UK cohort, full of rental and swap and resale apps betting on behavior change, this year's eight lean toward infrastructure, the tools that let brands and operators work differently without rebuilding from scratch, and eBay framed the 2026 round that way itself. Refiberd, the 2025 global winner, reads fiber composition with hyperspectral imaging. Trosort, this year's, sorts textiles by machine. That helps explain how a production-software company ended up in the room.
This cohort spans a lot of the system: sorting, resale, and returns, but also sourcing, design, and production. Circularity gets most of its public attention at the end of the line. The make side is another part of the same problem, where waste gets made in failed samples, in runs sized by guesswork, and in stock that never sells at all. How much never sells is genuinely unclear. A European Environment Agency review put the average around a fifth while stressing that the underlying information is limited.
That is where Silhouet works. The bet is that when the spec is right the first time, sample rounds do not multiply, and when a run is sized to real demand instead of a guess, less of it goes unsold. We are early enough that this is still a thesis rather than a number I can show you, and the beta cohort is how we find out. What I do believe is that getting production right saves money first, which means it does not need a brand to care about sustainability to be worth doing.
What the grant changes for Silhouet
The $50K goes into onboarding the beta cohort, connecting brands to a vertically integrated sourcing and manufacturing partner, and rounding out the team. The near-term goal is unglamorous: real production runs moving through Silhouet end to end, with more of the coordination handled by software than by a thread of emails.
Congratulations to Trosort on the win. The bigger prize for us is the company: seven other teams working the same problem from different angles. 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.
From the night
Building the make side, with good company.
Silhouet takes emerging fashion brands from an idea to a factory-ready product, without the spreadsheet and email sprawl in between. Free to start during beta.