Kosha is using AI for a future-ready textile ecosystem
Kosha brings together cutting-edge fibre analysis, digital product passports, and real-time supply-chain intelligence to support a circular and transparent textile ecosystem. Its solutions help brands, manufacturers, and recyclers verify materials, track product journeys, and meet global standards.
In an exclusive interview with Fibre2Fashion, Co-founder Vijaya Krishnappa how Kosha is integrating AI, photonics, and IoT to bring scientific precision, traceability, and circularity into textile design, manufacturing, and recycling for a future-ready textile ecosystem.
What inspired you to merge textile innovation with AI through Kosha.ai, and how does the platform use artificial intelligence to enhance fabric design and development?
As a textile engineer, I had first-hand exposure to the entire value chain and the sustainability issues embedded within it. While working on these challenges, I recognised that AI could solve problems traditional algorithms could not—so we integrated advanced AI with material science to drive circular design from the very beginning.
One of the core principles of circularity is to be circular by design. The design stage determines how sustainable a product will be throughout its life cycle. The materials we choose today decide whether a product can be reused, recycled, or lost as waste.
For example, complex fibre blends may look or feel premium but are far more difficult to segregate, sort, and recycle at end of life. Designing with circularity in mind means anticipating this and selecting materials, finishes, and constructions that can re-enter the value chain instead of ending up in landfills.
This is where artificial intelligence and molecular fingerprinting play a transformative role.
Our state-of-the-art innovation combines AI with photonic sensors to identify and classify fabrics with scientific precision. By analysing fibre blends at a molecular level, we generate insights that help designers and manufacturers make informed, circular material choices from the very beginning.
In essence, AI is helping the industry design products not just for beauty and performance, but for longevity, recyclability, and planetary well-being.
How does your technology improve sustainability in textile production?
Our sustainability advantage starts with IoT-driven data authenticity. By capturing real-time, tamper-proof data directly from machines, sensors, and production points, we enable true end-to-end traceability and more effective circular material management powered by AI and photonics-based fibre identification.
Manufacturers gain complete visibility across their supply chain, while AI powered material analysis and photonics- based fibre identification make it possible to sort, recycle, and reuse fabrics more effectively.
Together, IoT and AI make sustainability not just a promise but a measurable, traceable, and actionable reality.
What specific textile challenges does Kosha.ai aim to solve for manufacturers or designers?
Kosha addresses two key challenges in the textile industry, fragmented supply chains and limited visibility for designers.
For manufacturers, we view traceability as a tool for operational intelligence and profitability, not just compliance. When the entire supply chain is mapped from sourcing to finishing, inefficiencies, errors, and material losses can be identified and reduced. This visibility directly improves productivity and margins.
For example, one of our clients in the Chhattisgarh handloom cluster worked with over 150 artisan weavers across multiple villages, along with several dyeing units and yarn suppliers. The yarn used was high-value, and even minor leakages led to financial losses. We implemented batch-level traceability from yarn to dye to loom to finished garment, connecting every stakeholder on one digital platform. This enabled the team to eliminate material loss, monitor quality, and enhance profitability.
For designers, such visibility bridges creativity and production. They can trace materials, track timelines, and ensure that craftsmanship aligns with design intent.
How do you ensure accuracy and quality of textile data your AI systems analyse?
At Kosha, accuracy begins with data integrity. FibreSENSE captures molecular fingerprints and interprets them using chemometrics and domain-driven statistical models rather than generic black-box ML, ensuring interpretability and robust fibre discrimination. Models undergo blind validation against certified lab tests and are continuously improved using field data to maintain accuracy across diverse regions and material types.
Continuous field feedback from deployments refines models over time, adapting to regional material variations. The result is high accuracy and dependable insights that form a trustworthy foundation for sustainable decision-making.
In what ways has AI transformed traditional textile processes for your clients?
AI has revolutionised textile recycling and manufacturing by replacing subjective, manual sorting with data-driven precision and consistency.
Manual sorting can carry an error rate of 40–50 per cent and often exposes workers to contaminants.
FibreSENSE enables fast, contactless, and accurate identification, while KOSHATrace provides digital traceability that helps brands verify claims and advance circularity.
How do you see digital twins or virtual sampling shaping the future of the textile industry?
Digital twins and virtual sampling are transforming how textiles are designed, tested, and traced.
We envision a future where physical samples become the exception, not the rule. By integrating AI-driven material intelligence with digital twins, designers can simulate how fabrics behave, age, or recycle, long before production begins. This reduces waste, shortens design cycles, and enables true-to-life sustainability modelling.
Paired with Digital Product Passports (DPPs), every textile can also carry its own digital identity: recording its composition, origin, and full lifecycle data. This ensures transparency, regulatory compliance, and end-of-life recovery.
At Kosha, we are already building this bridge between the virtual and physical worlds by linking material data from AI, Photonics, and IoT systems to DPP-ready digital records. In doing so, we are laying the foundation for a textile ecosystem where every material has a twin, every product has a passport, and every decision is informed by data.
What role do collaborations with mills or brands play in advancing Kosha.ai’s innovations?
Collaboration is at the heart of Kosha’s innovation model.
We work directly with mills, recyclers and brands to calibrate our AI systems using real-world textile data and to understand on-ground operational challenges. These partnerships help us validate our solutions across diverse materials and production setups, ensuring they perform reliably in actual conditions.
We see ourselves as value co-creators. We design solutions with Textile Recovery Facilities (TRFs) and recyclers by listening, customising, and iterating together so that everyone wins.
Our partners gain tools tailored to their needs, and we gain insights that make our technologies more adaptive, inclusive, and impactful.
How do you envision AI redefining creativity and efficiency in textile manufacturing over the next decade?
AI will be the co-creator and quality guardian of the textile industry’s future. From design to recycling, it will enable data-informed creativity, where aesthetics and sustainability coexist seamlessly.
Designers will use AI-driven insights to reduce wasteful iterations, predict trends, and optimise materials for circularity, while manufacturers will rely on predictive analytics to improve material efficiency and production flow.
The convergence of AI, IoT, and material science will make every fabric traceable, recyclable, and intelligently designed for reuse.
In the next decade, efficiency won’t just mean lower cost; it will mean higher circular value, where every textile tells a verified sustainability story.
How is the integration of AI and digital tools transforming the global textile supply chain?
AI and digital tools are fundamentally reshaping how the global textile supply chain operates and at Kosha, we are at the forefront of that transformation.
By integrating AI with IoT and Photonics-based technologies, we turn complex, unstructured textile data into actionable intelligence.
Our AI models perform data modelling across the entire value chain, from fibre composition to process efficiency, enabling manufacturers, brands, and recyclers to make faster, evidence-based decisions.
This integration bridges gaps between material science, production, and sustainability. It creates real-time visibility, predictive insights, and verifiable traceability, helping global supply chains move from reactive to intelligent, transparent, and circular systems.
In essence, AI is not just optimising how textiles are made; it is reimagining how they are understood, traced, and valued across their lifecycle.
What are the biggest challenges in achieving full circularity within the textile industry?
The biggest challenge in achieving full circularity lies in connecting the dots between sorting, recycling, and value recognition and regulations.
Sorting remains one of the largest bottlenecks in circularity, and even when quality feedstock improves, recyclers struggle with thin margins.
The economics of recycling are fragile, better quality doesn’t always translate into better prices, which discourages large-scale adoption.
To truly unlock circularity, brands, policymakers, and recyclers must align on the value of quality, traceable materials and share the responsibility for their cost.
Achieving circularity requires alignment between brands, policymakers, and recyclers so that quality, traceable materials are valued and financially viable.
How are consumer demands for transparency and traceability influencing textile innovation today?
Today’s consumers want to know where their products were made, who made them, and under what conditions. This growing expectation for authenticity and accountability has directly influenced how the industry designs, manufactures, and communicates.
The European Union’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) initiative is a clear example of this shift. Soon, every product sold in or entering the EU will require a digital record of its journey, from raw materials to finished goods. This is a consumer-led movement that is driving brands, manufacturers, and innovators to build systems of traceability and accountability across the value chain.
In many ways, transparency has become the new standard of trust, and it is inspiring a wave of technological innovation focused on visibility, verification, and circularity.
