EverestLabs Launches First-Ever Agentic AI Platform for Materials Processing, Recovery and Recycling Facilities

Navigator provides real-time analysis and actions for plant operators, significantly upgrading the largely undigitized $6 trillion global materials economy sector

FREMONT, Calif., Aug. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- EverestLabs is launching Navigator, the first-ever multi-agent AI platform purposely-built for material processing, recovery and recycling facilities, a major upgrade for a sector that is one of the largest and least-digitized layers of the materials economy.

Navigator gives plant operators real-time operational intelligence and acts on it to improve efficiency, throughput and financial performance across recycling and processing facilities handling plastics, fiber and metals.

Navigator brings together three layers of AI that have never operated as one system on a materials economy facility floor: edge vision models that classify material at the belt, vision-language models (VLMs) that interpret each stream in context, and reasoning and conversational agents that recommend and act.

Navigator moves beyond static dashboards with specialized AI agents that monitor equipment health and coordinate systems in a continuous closed loop, allowing for ideal material processing and sorting in real time. It is trained on billions of data points and processes chaotic and highly variable material flows at millisecond speeds.

Navigator plugs directly into existing plant control networks and older, legacy equipment without the need for expensive retrofits or halting production.

Navigator fundamentally alters the profit-and-loss statement for material processing facilities through the following benefits:

Boosting Facility Throughput Up to 30%: Navigator mitigates material flow problems and idle belt time, which can often boost a facility's capacity between 20-30%, thus increasing revenue.

Millions Saved Through Reduced Downtime: Navigator applies AI agents to predict belt or equipment failure and track anomalies, catching issues before they happen and deploying fixes before it becomes a problem. This can save millions of dollars in avoided downtime, spare parts and other costs.

Avoid Costly Losses to Landfill and Increase Reuse of Valuable Commodities: Faulty sorting by legacy equipment results in the loss of plastics, metals, fibers and other commodities, costing operators potentially millions of dollars annually. These commodities end up in landfills instead of being reused as feedstock. Navigator finds these losses, pinpoints the sources of loss and optimizes equipment to improve sorting and reuse of the commodities.

Regulatory Audits & EPR Compliance Made Easy: Navigator continuously monitors material composition and tracks facility level recovery and residue rates, which are mandated by municipal contracts and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations. Navigator helps operators and regulators assess fees, contract structures and investment decisions with data previously not available.

"The next great frontier for AI is in the scrap yards, recycling and waste streams that underpin our industrial economy," said R. Paul Singh, CEO of EverestLabs. "By deploying Physical AI to recover the 93% of raw materials we currently never reuse, we're not just boosting recycling—we're building supply chain sovereignty, turning every recovered ton into a domestic asset that insulates manufacturers from global volatility."

EverestLabs previously created the first AI-powered operating system for recycling facilities, called RecycleOS, and is a leading provider of physical AI-based robotic sorters for the recycling industry.

Navigator is a natural extension of the sensing and automating done by vision AI and robotics. With granular intelligence, AI agents can extend the automation from robotic sorting to orchestrating any equipment and operational workflows.

"We're proud to work with early customers such as Caglia Environmental and to collaborate with world-class industry partners such as Schneider Electric and Pellenc ST as they integrate Navigator into their ecosystems," said JD Ambati, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. "Navigator will be an AI process engineer, a data analyst and a controls specialist working for facility operators who have relied on manual guesswork for far too long."

"Navigator has removed the guesswork from our daily operations and makes our MRF a fully AI run and managed plant," said Corey Stone, Plant Manager at Caglia Environmental. "It takes the complexity out of data analytics, giving us immediate, actionable answers that drive productivity so we can focus on keeping safety our top priority."

"Truly successful sorting operations require intelligent synchronization between optical sorters, sensors, and purpose-built AI technologies that orchestrate execution across the facility," said Jean Henin, CEO of Pellenc ST. "We at Pellenc support the industry moving in this direction and share the Navigator's vision for AI-driven sorting."

"The next generation of industrial automation will be increasingly autonomous, using AI to optimize and execute operations," said Pierre-Emmanuel Cotte, Incubation Business Partner at Schneider Electric. "We are accelerating this vision with open, software-defined architectures and an ecosystem that drives flexibility, scalability and innovation. The combination of EcoStruxure™ Automation Expert, AVEVA's industrial intelligence capabilities, and EverestLabs' Navigator Agentic AI platform bridges operational technology and AI-driven decision-making, enabling safer, more efficient and continuously optimized autonomous operations at scale."

About EverestLabs
EverestLabs is the leader in physical and agentic AI solutions for the industrial materials economy. Its portfolio spans two flagship platforms: EverestLabs Navigator, an agentic AI platform that orchestrates material movement and processing in real time, and EverestLabs Robotics, home to the industry's largest installed base of AI-powered high-speed sorting systems. Together, they help operators across recycling, resource recovery, metals, e-waste, packaging, and mining recover more value, increase throughput, reduce downtime, and unlock millions in new revenue from infrastructure they already own. Headquartered in Fremont, California, EverestLabs is building the intelligence and orchestration layer for the materials economy. More details can be found at https://everestlabs.ai/.

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SOURCE EverestLabs