Are you a Lego enthusiast with a massive pile of loose bricks you’re way too busy to sort? This Lithuanian startup’s AI-powered sorting system can help.
Sort A Brick uses computer vision to clean, sort, and repackage used bricks into ready-to-build sets with 99% accuracy, per Tech.eu. It can identify 25k+ different brick types across 4k+ shapes and 40 colors (not including Minifigures or Mini-dolls).
How it works
Sort a Brick currently serves customers across Western Europe, who send in their jumbled Lego collections. AI scans the bricks and matches them to a list of 10k+ Lego sets (some dating back to 1954) to determine which could be built with what’s available and which require a few missing pieces.
Customers can then decide to have their bricks cleaned, sorted, and packaged into ready-to-build sets, and if they want to source any missing bricks.
Prices start at ~$12 for each kilogram of bricks sent, plus shipping. To have bricks resorted into sets is an additional ~$30 per kilogram, plus the cost of replacement bricks.
Why?
Co-founder Ilya Malkin was inspired by the time-consuming chore of sorting through his own children’s bricks, but there’s also a rising interest in used toys.
While resale Lego bricks are often “confined to fan communities,” Malkin told tech.eu, the right tech could “unlock massive untapped demand for quality used sets in the mainstream market.”
There are currently websites like BrickLink and Brick Owl where Lego fans can buy and sell bricks, and multiple organizations that will take donated bricks and supply them to children in need, including Lego’s Replay program and Brick Recycler.
Sort a Brick differs in that it gives new lives to customers’ own collections, which they can enjoy again or pass on.
What’s next?
Sort a Brick is looking to raise $3.3m+ to build two sorting centers in Western Europe and ultimately expand to additional countries and other toys. It’s also interested in licensing its tech to toy recyclers that would benefit from its speed — Malkin claims Sort a Brick can process three times the volume of bricks per hour as other systems with less than a tenth the human labor.
It still can’t stop you from stepping on that one errant brick you forgot to put away in the middle of the night, though.
