Most people never think twice about the little tag attached to a piece of clothing. It gets scanned, it helps the retailer track stock, and then it usually gets torn off and thrown away. That tiny label feels disposable, but in reality, it carries a much bigger footprint than most shoppers realize.
That is the problem Chloe So decided to look at more closely.
Instead of accepting RFID waste as a normal part of modern retail, she helped build PulpaTronics around a simple but powerful question: what if the tag itself could be redesigned from the ground up? That question led to a startup focused on making RFID tags more recyclable, less material-heavy, and more practical for a retail industry under growing pressure to cut waste without losing efficiency.
PulpaTronics has gained attention because it is not trying to replace retail technology with something slower or less useful. It is trying to keep the value of RFID while removing a big part of what makes traditional tags expensive, wasteful, and difficult to recycle. In a space where sustainability talk can often feel vague, Chloe So and PulpaTronics stand out because the problem they are addressing is concrete, overlooked, and tied to real commercial use.
The retail waste problem Chloe So chose to tackle
RFID, short for radio-frequency identification, is already deeply embedded in retail. It helps brands and stores keep track of inventory, reduce stock errors, support faster checkout, and improve visibility across the supply chain. For retailers, that matters. Better stock accuracy means fewer missed sales, fewer fulfillment issues, and less chaos between warehouses, shop floors, and online orders.
But traditional RFID tags come with a tradeoff. They are usually made from a mix of materials such as paper, plastic, silicon, and metal. That combination helps them function, but it also makes them hard to recycle once their job is done. In fashion especially, where tags are attached to huge volumes of products and often used for a short period, that adds up quickly.
Chloe So saw that this was not a small design flaw. It was a systems problem hidden in plain sight.
Retailers had embraced RFID because it improved operations, yet the tag itself remained surprisingly resource-intensive. It relied on materials that were costly to extract, awkward to separate, and poorly suited to a circular economy. The usual pattern was simple: manufacture at scale, attach to products, use briefly, throw away.
That gap between retail efficiency and retail waste became the opportunity behind PulpaTronics.
Where the PulpaTronics idea came from
PulpaTronics did not begin as a generic climate startup pitch. It grew out of a real design and engineering environment, with Chloe So and Barna Soma Biro developing the idea during their Innovation Design Engineering work linked to Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.
That background matters because PulpaTronics sits in the middle of several worlds at once. It is not just a sustainability story. It is also a design story, a materials story, and a commercial technology story. The company came from the kind of thinking that asks not only whether a product works, but whether it makes sense in the full chain of manufacturing, use, and disposal.
For Chloe So, that meant looking at RFID not as a fixed piece of infrastructure, but as something that could be rethought. Instead of treating the waste built into traditional RFID tags as unavoidable, PulpaTronics approached the problem with a more stripped-back mindset. If the goal is product identification and inventory tracking, do all the conventional materials and manufacturing steps still make sense?
That way of thinking helped shape PulpaTronics into something more focused than many early-stage startups. It was not trying to solve every sustainability issue in retail. It was targeting one specific pain point that sits inside a much bigger industry.
How Chloe So and PulpaTronics reimagined the RFID tag
What makes PulpaTronics interesting is that the company is not just swapping one material for another. It is rethinking how the tag gets made in the first place.
The startup’s approach centers on using laser technology to induce a conductive circuit directly onto paper. That changes the structure of the tag itself. Instead of depending on the conventional metal antenna found in many RFID inlays, PulpaTronics has been building a metal-free, paper-based alternative designed to be more compatible with existing paper recycling systems.
That sounds technical, but the commercial logic is easy to understand.
A simpler tag design can mean fewer components, fewer manufacturing steps, and less reliance on mined materials. It can also make it easier for retailers and packaging partners to think about end-of-life disposal in a more practical way. Rather than creating another mixed-material item that is difficult to recover, PulpaTronics is pushing toward an RFID format that better fits circular retail goals.
This is one reason Chloe So’s work has stood out. She has helped position PulpaTronics not as a niche eco product, but as a better answer to a real operational tool retailers already use every day.
Why a better RFID tag matters to retailers
Sustainability alone is rarely enough to move retail systems at scale. Retailers care about environmental impact, but they also care about cost, speed, compatibility, inventory accuracy, and ease of rollout. That is exactly why PulpaTronics has a stronger story than many startups that lead with sustainability but struggle to connect it to business reality.
RFID already plays an important role across retail operations. Brands use it for stock counting, loss prevention, self-checkout, item-level tracking, and supply chain visibility. In other words, the market does not need to be convinced that tagging matters. The market needs a tagging solution that works better in a world increasingly shaped by waste reduction goals, emissions pressure, and circular economy expectations.
PulpaTronics fits that shift well.
By focusing on recyclable, metal-free paper RFID tags, the company speaks to two retail priorities at once. The first is practical performance. The second is material efficiency. Chloe So has helped make that balance central to the company’s message, which is one reason PulpaTronics feels commercially relevant rather than idealistic.
There is also a broader strategic angle here. As major retailers and fashion businesses face more pressure around sustainability reporting, packaging waste, and resource use, even small product components start to matter more. A price tag may be tiny, but at industry scale, tiny things become big numbers very quickly.
The early traction that helped PulpaTronics stand out
A good idea gets attention. A good idea with proof points gets momentum.
PulpaTronics has managed to build both.
The company’s early journey included strong support from the Imperial entrepreneurship ecosystem. It won one of the tracks in the Venture Catalyst Challenge in 2023, which helped validate the concept at an early stage. It also benefited from support connected to Undaunted, the climate-focused ecosystem backed by Imperial.
That kind of backing matters because it suggests PulpaTronics was not just interesting in theory. It was seen as a venture with real commercial and environmental potential.
From there, the story kept moving. PulpaTronics later raised pre-seed funding, including a reported £430,000 round to begin testing its recyclable RFID tags with retailers. It also secured support through InnovationRCA and investment from the RCA Design and Innovation S/EIS Fund, showing that both startup and design-led innovation networks saw long-term promise in the business.
Those milestones helped shift PulpaTronics from student project territory into the more serious category of venture-backed retail technology.
Chloe So’s role in turning a technical idea into a marketable company
Founders in deep tech often face the same challenge. The technology may be impressive, but if the market cannot quickly understand why it matters, momentum slows down.
That is where Chloe So’s role becomes especially important.
PulpaTronics is built on technical innovation, but the company’s public story is clear because the problem is clear. Chloe So has helped communicate that the issue is not abstract electronics waste. It is a real flaw in how modern retail tagging works. That framing gives the company a sharper edge.
She also represents the kind of founder profile that tends to resonate in modern startup ecosystems: part product thinker, part commercial storyteller, part problem solver. The success of PulpaTronics is not only about building a new RFID format. It is also about translating that format into a business narrative that retailers, funders, accelerators, and climate innovation programs can all understand.
That helps explain why Chloe So’s name is increasingly tied to the startup’s rise rather than sitting quietly in the background.
When people talk about founder success, they often focus only on fundraising or awards. But in Chloe So’s case, success also looks like making an invisible infrastructure problem visible enough for the market to care.
The recognition that pushed PulpaTronics further
As PulpaTronics moved forward, the company began collecting the kind of recognition that signals real momentum.
Chloe So and Barna Soma Biro were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in Manufacturing and Industry in 2025, a milestone that put PulpaTronics in front of a much broader audience. That recognition did not come out of nowhere. It reflected the company’s growing reputation as a startup tackling a real industrial problem with a smarter materials and manufacturing approach.
The same year also brought more signs of traction. PulpaTronics highlighted commercial sampling, third-party validation work, inclusion in startup lists, and major award wins. One of the most notable was being selected as one of the winners of the H&M Foundation Global Change Award, which gave the company even more credibility in the wider conversation around fashion innovation and circular materials.
These achievements matter because they show PulpaTronics is not only being noticed as an interesting startup. It is being taken seriously in the overlapping spaces of retail technology, sustainable materials, and climate-focused innovation.
Why PulpaTronics fits the bigger shift toward circular retail
PulpaTronics is part of a wider movement in retail and fashion. For years, sustainability conversations focused heavily on fabrics, packaging, shipping, and resale. Those still matter, but the industry is gradually paying more attention to smaller components that have been ignored for too long.
That is where PulpaTronics has found a smart opening.
It is working on one of those background technologies that most consumers never notice but that retailers use at enormous scale. By improving the tag itself, the company is addressing a hidden layer of waste inside the retail system. That makes the business more interesting than a surface-level green brand story.
It also places Chloe So and PulpaTronics inside a more meaningful conversation about circular economy design. Circular retail is not only about what products are made from. It is also about what supporting materials, tracking tools, packaging systems, and infrastructure components are made from, how they are manufactured, and what happens to them after use.
In that sense, PulpaTronics is doing something valuable. It is pushing sustainability deeper into the architecture of retail rather than leaving it at the level of marketing claims.
What Chloe So and PulpaTronics show about the future of sustainable retail technology
The strongest part of the PulpaTronics story is that it feels grounded.
Chloe So did not build the company around a vague promise to make retail greener someday. She helped build it around a specific waste problem, a more thoughtful technical solution, and a business case that retailers can actually understand.
That combination is what gives PulpaTronics its momentum.
It sits at the intersection of RFID innovation, paper electronics, materials science, retail operations, and circular economy thinking. It is relevant to fashion, supply chain management, packaging, and sustainable product design all at once. And because the company is working on something so widely used, even small improvements can have outsized impact when scaled.
For anyone looking at Chloe So’s success, that is the real story. She is not just building another startup with a sustainability label attached. She is helping reshape a neglected but important part of retail infrastructure, and PulpaTronics is gaining attention because that effort feels practical, timely, and commercially real.
