The Story of Sensonio: Building the Digital Infrastructure for Circular Economy

The Story of Sensonio: Building the Digital Infrastructure for Circular Economy

Empty bins collected daily while overflowing containers sit for weeks. Factories producing mountains of waste with no visibility into where it comes from or where it goes. Students leaving bottles in the streets after parties, knowing homeless people will collect them for deposits. These aren’t random observations—they’re the puzzle pieces that Sensonio has been assembling since 2014.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Martin Kosak, CMO at Sensonio, shared how this smart waste management platform has grown from ultrasound sensors to becoming the IT infrastructure powering deposit refund systems across five European countries.

The Beginning: Seeing What Others Couldn’t

Sensonio’s story starts with a simple but powerful insight: waste management was operating blind. Cities, factories, and collection companies had no data about what was happening with their bins and containers. They were running collection routes based on schedules rather than actual need.

The founding team’s answer was fill-level sensors based on ultrasound technology. These sensors measure the capacity inside bins and dumpsters, enabling collection only when actually needed. “These are core products. And the sensors, they are measuring the capacity inside of the beans or dumpsters. And based on that, you can pick up the containers or beans more efficiently, because you are not collecting half empty bins or containers,” Martin explains.

The concept proved itself at scale. Today, Madrid has more than 11,000 of these sensors deployed across the city—a testament to the technology’s reliability and value proposition. But getting there required a crucial strategic decision: embracing a partner model.

Scaling Through Networks, Not Employees

Many hardware companies try to control deployment and installation directly. Sensonio took a different path. “What is also important to say at displays that we scale through a network of reseller partners and system integrators all over the world,” Martin notes. “So it’s not like our technicians need to go for a deployment of sensors to New Zealand or Argentina.”

This partner-led approach allowed Sensonio to expand to projects in over 80 countries without building a massive field operations team. Some projects are pilots and proofs of concept, but others represent large-scale installations serving major municipalities and private collection companies.

The solution proved versatile beyond municipal waste. Sensonio’s sensors work for private haulers managing different waste streams—used oil, textiles, paper shredding companies. Any situation where bins or containers need optimized collection became a potential market.

Expanding the Vision: From Bins to Buildings

With municipal waste collection proven, Sensonio identified another opportunity: factories and large facilities. These industrial sites function like cities within cities, generating complex waste streams across different departments and production lines.

“The same like we do for cities, but on a smaller scale. But like, imagine a very big factory, almost like a city within the city. So they also need somehow to digitize their floor plan and their waste infrastructure,” Martin explains.

For these customers, Sensonio’s value proposition shifted from operational efficiency to sustainability reporting and compliance. “They can track, for example, the weight of the waste up to every hole or section of the factory, or even container stands. And they can also report a contamination with our solution, and get data about waste diversion rate, and see how good they sort the waste.”

This evolution reflects a broader market shift. As ESG reporting requirements tighten and sustainability becomes a board-level concern, factories need data infrastructure to understand and optimize their waste footprint. Sensonio provides that visibility.

The target personas shifted accordingly. While municipal projects involve chief operations officers or waste management directors, factory installations engage sustainability directors and ESG leaders—executives with budgets and mandates to improve environmental performance.

The Holy Grail: Deposit Refund Systems

Then Sensonio made its boldest move: building IT systems for deposit refund schemes (DRS). These systems—where consumers pay a deposit on beverage containers and receive it back upon return—represent what Martin calls the “holy grail of waste management.”

The concept works beautifully in practice. Martin shares a story from his university days in Germany: “When I used to study in Germany, and the students were making party out in the streets, they always let the empty bottles outside, because they knew that homeless people will come and collect it. And next morning everything was basically very clean.”

This isn’t just about cleaner streets. Deposit systems deliver high-quality recyclable material—plastic bottles and aluminum cans returned in good condition rather than contaminated in mixed waste streams. “You are collecting a really valuable material. And the wheel of circular economy is rotating. And it really helps in terms of cleaner urban spaces in nature,” Martin explains.

But implementing DRS at scale requires sophisticated software infrastructure. You need to track deposits, manage collection points, process returns, coordinate payments, and interface with retailers, consumers, and recycling facilities. It’s complex enough that “the best what you can do it is on a nationwide level.”

Here’s where Sensonio’s ambition becomes clear: “Since only the sole company, we’re all doing the it system already in five european countries. So that’s a pretty big deal for us.”

Five countries. Five different regulatory environments, languages, retail systems, and payment infrastructures. Most companies would struggle to deploy enterprise software across five countries. Sensonio is doing it for critical national infrastructure—systems that process millions of transactions and millions of containers.

Building Brand in an Unsexy Industry

Scaling hardware is one challenge. Scaling infrastructure software is another. But scaling brand awareness across multiple product lines and markets? That’s where Martin’s marketing comes in.

His approach centers on creating genuine value rather than chasing vanity metrics. When Sensonio needed awareness for their DRS capabilities, they didn’t just advertise. “We basically cover the whole DRS topic. We took it as a cluster and we wrote articles from very explanatory basic articles, but up to very in house research articles where we gathered, for example the numbers of the collection rates in european countries.”

The result? “When you right now searching Google for deposit refund system or you put in deposit refund system in european countries, you will probably find our bulk article.”

They went further with the Global Waste Index, a comprehensive ranking of OECD countries on waste management created in partnership with a professional PR agency. “This is actually the most visited page on our website after the homepage,” Martin notes—proof that valuable content attracts audiences even in unsexy industries.

The Future: Infrastructure for Circular Economy

So where does Sensonio go from here? The company sits at the intersection of several powerful trends: increasing regulatory pressure around waste and recycling, growing corporate sustainability commitments, urbanization creating denser waste management challenges, and the broader digitalization of infrastructure.

Their product evolution tells the story of expanding ambition. From sensors measuring fill levels, to facility-wide waste tracking systems, to national deposit refund infrastructure—each step builds toward a larger vision.

That vision centers on data and digitalization. Just as cities installed water meters to understand consumption, waste management needs sensors and systems to understand flows, optimize collection, improve sorting, and enable circular economy business models.

The deposit refund systems business particularly signals Sensonio’s ambitions. These aren’t point solutions sold to individual companies. They’re infrastructure plays—long-term relationships with governments and industry consortia running critical systems. The contracts are complex, the implementation timelines are long, but the revenue streams are stable and the switching costs are high.

With projects across 80 countries and IT systems running in five, Sensonio has moved beyond startup to scale-up. The challenge now isn’t proving the technology works—it’s proved that in Madrid, in factories, in deposit systems. The challenge is building the organization, partnerships, and brand to capture the massive market opportunity ahead.

As waste becomes data and data enables better decisions, Sensonio is building the digital infrastructure that makes circular economy possible at scale. From sensors in bins to systems processing millions of containers, they’re turning waste management from a blind, schedule-driven operation into an intelligent, data-driven system.

The future they’re building? One where every bin, every container, every waste stream generates data that enables optimization. Where cities minimize collection costs while maximizing cleanliness. Where factories understand and reduce their waste footprint. Where consumers participate in circular economy through seamless deposit returns. And where Sensonio provides the digital infrastructure making all of it possible.