Alumni Spotlight: Sarika Bajaj
Co-Founder and CEO of Refiberd
By Sarah Elizabeth Bender
Classes within the Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology (IDeATe) network at Carnegie Mellon do more than train students in a specific art or technology — they connect diverse strengths across the university to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and new ways of problem-solving. We checked in with 2020 College of Engineering graduate Sarika Bajaj, who minored in Physical Computing with IDeATe during her time as an undergraduate, to see how experiences from IDeATe have helped her in her post-graduation achievements.
Q: Tell us a bit about what you’re doing with your life now that you’ve graduated. Is there a project you’re working on?
A: In 2020, right after I completed my Masters degree, I founded a company with my co-founder Tushita Gupta (who is also a CMU alum). Around that time, we were seeing a lot of big improvements in textile recycling thanks to major chemical breakthroughs. Materials in textiles are notoriously hard to recycle, and we knew that textile waste sorting was going to become the critical issue. When you look at a plastic bottle, you know what it’s made of, and you can recycle it accordingly. But for a textile, you can look at a shirt and have no idea what it’s made of. There are often four, five, six different materials in a single shirt — elastane for stretch, cotton polyester blends, and more!
What my company Refiberd does is, we use a sensor called a hyperspectral camera to detect the way light interacts with materials. Different materials absorb and reflect light differently, and in combination with AI technology that we have developed, we can predict material makeup within 2% of actual composition, including complex blends and trace fibers. Using this process, we can sort textile waste for recycling, help companies meet global material certification standards, and even test products for authentication — for example, if you suspect that a bag is fake, you can give it a quick scan and see whether it’s made of the material it’s meant to be. There are many different applications, and we’ve been able to work directly with textile recycling companies, brands, and resellers to test and refine our system.
We’ve raised $4.1M in dilutive funding and won $550k in grants, including from Fashion For Good and PDS Ventures. In 2023, we won H&M’s “Global Change Award” and were recognized as Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in AI. Then, in 2025, we were the global winner of eBay x CFDA’s “Circular Fashion Fund,” and since then, eBay Ventures has joined as an investor.
Q: Can you share an experience from an IDeATe class at CMU that has stuck with you? Why did it make such a strong impression?
A: Before IDeATe, I didn’t know anything about textiles! I accidentally fell into the textile industry — my first internship ended up being with an experimental textiles team. But I learned so much about the industry through Olivia Robinson, who was setting up coursework for the Soft Technologies minor at the time. Being able to learn about how production happens, knit vs. woven structures, and how textiles are made was really formative for me, and is quite literally the thing I use the most in my career today.
When you’re in engineering classes, it’s all so theoretical. Even lab classes can be pretty abstract, and I’m definitely the kind of person who needs to see the point in what we’re learning in order to feel good about it. IDeATe definitely offers that connection point between what you’re doing technically, and why it matters. I was a TA for Olivia’s Intro to Textiles course, and that’s one example of a class that connects to the real world. It explored the cultural experience of textiles, ways to think about textile production through the lens of history, current manufacturing processes, and more.
Q: How do you think IDeATe helped to prepare you for your role today? What skills from IDeATe are you using as you advance your career?
A: IDeATe cultivates this idea of ownership of a project that ties in well with entrepreneurship. In every IDeATe course, you have to budget resources, figure out time allocations, and often create a public deliverable. Having to practice what it means to deliver projects that are going to be visible and have to communicate something to an external audience really resonates with what we’ve done at Refiberd.
Another thing is that in almost every IDeATe class, you have to present your work in some way. You go through critiques, explain what you’re doing and why, and that communication element was really good practice for my future career. There’s a cycle that’s come up a lot professionally within my CEO role, where I’m pitching to customers, getting feedback from investors, engaging in that communication loop. Going in with some experience not taking feedback personally and improving based on critique — even ignoring certain feedback, because not all feedback is useful — has been invaluable.
IDeATe was also a big reason that college became fun for me. The program gives you space to be an individual — you’re not just working on the same problems that everyone else is, but developing your own opinions and pursuing your own interests. There’s something about that freedom that gives you the space to be human in the best way, and having more motivation to take joy in the work you do is not something to be taken for granted.Q: What would you say to a student considering whether to enroll in an IDeATe class at CMU?
A: For people who are considering taking their first IDeATe class, there’s not really much to lose! There’s something nice about this low-stakes exploration that you’re engaging in just because you want to. When you leave college, it can be hard if you’ve never done that type of exploration before, and life tends to get in the way. But there’s this beautiful moment when you’re in school where you have the opportunity to try all kinds of new things, and IDeATe is a great vehicle to do that.
For students who have been a part of IDeATe, who have taken classes before, IDeATe is very good at making you think laterally in a way that a lot of other classes don’t. It gets you to think about applications for what you’ve studied, whether that’s chemistry, bio, writing, engineering, and helps you realize that the world is much bigger than we’ve ever been taught before. It can take you to interesting places, and help you find a career that you feel really fulfilled by.
So short term, it feels like there’s very little risk to explore something new. Longer term, you can expand how you view and understand the world. Are there opportunities you have to dig a little harder for? You may not end up going through the same job application process that you see your friends going through, but that’s not a bad thing. IDeATe is the perfect avenue to discover something that other people might not know about, just because they didn’t go through that same process.
About Refiberd: Refiberd was created by a women-led team of engineers who set out to solve the global textile waste crisis. They founded Refiberd with the goal of bringing the cutting-edge of AI research to the fashion industry. From deep research backgrounds in artificial intelligence and textile engineering, they believe in the power of technology to unlock a 100% circular economy.
