Digital trading platform Matium has raised $8 million in funding and secured a trade finance facility to enable its own growth and add transparency to the US recycled plastics market, the company announced today.
The trade finance facility from Erebor Bank allows for new financing options – in essence, a line of credit Matium can use to help sellers get paid in a timely fashion, CEO Bailey Robin told Plastics Recycling Update.
Ohio-headquartered Erebor was launched in February 2026, and caters to startups and high-net-worth people in the AI and manufacturing sectors, as well as in defense and cryptocurrency. Founded by tech billionaire Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel, Erebor is the first new bank to receive a national charter under the second Trump administration.
“Providing financing was what we consistently heard from this industry,” Robin said, adding that the dramatic spike in raw materials pricing over the past month squeezed buyers even further.
In addition, over the past few years of economic uncertainty, buyers have extended payment terms while seller terms have remained the same, exacerbating the recent volatility, he said.
Matium says about 10% of the US plastics industry currently uses the platform’s infrastructure, and the new financing options help “pull forward supply at a time when the industry desperately needs it.”
While it is free to transact on the Matium marketplace, companies can opt into processing transactions through Matium and benefit from financing, freight and quality guarantees, Robin said.
“By driving the cost of financing and the cost of logistics down, we can then build a digitized market,” Robin said, billing the platform as a “tech-enhanced distribution service.”
Using data from growing transaction volumes, Matium – pronounced MAT-ee-yum – also will build its own transaction-based pricing index for specific materials, with the goal of adding transparency and driving competition, Robin said.
Material is sold on a spot basis on the platform, but longer-term, “I see us building contracts off of the volumes that we know we can,” he said.
The platform combines customer relationship management (CRM), inventory tracking (enterprise resource planning, or ERP), marketplace, freight and transaction processing into a single system of record, the company said in a statement.
Robin’s TomorrowMade company is among six freight partners that provide automated freight rate quotes on the Matium platform.
In addition to post-consumer plastic bales, flake and resin, Matium lists industrial packaging such as super sacks and pallets. In the future, the company hopes to expand into paper fiber, then chemicals, Robin said.
How it works
Robin compared the platform and its tools to the functionality of Amazon’s marketplace for sellers. View short demo videos here.
Matium trained an AI model to find relevant companies globally, and then determined which ones have resin silos, how big the facility is and whether they have rail access, to help inform an estimate of the volumes the company handles.
Matium’s AI engine matches buyers and sellers across cost, specifications and location parameters. Chemical producers and enterprise buyers also use Matium’s auction functionality to automate price discovery for spot materials, the company said in a statement.
“Our business model is to build a huge free market, make it available to everybody, build really good tools, and then we’ll monetize on freight, financing and data,” Robin said.
