[SINGAPORE] Goods that companies cannot sell in time often end up as waste in landfills, inflicting lasting damage on soil, water and the atmosphere.
Through its platform, Singapore-based startup Pollen Tech is helping firms clear such products before it is too late.
Between 2021 and 2024, Pollen helped more than a hundred sellers – including L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble – save up to 1.5 million kg of product waste by clearing inventory. It estimates that the impact of the waste averted in 2024 is equivalent to avoiding 4 million kg of carbon dioxide emissions.
Pollen’s contributions earned it an Impact Enterprise Excellence Award in the small and medium-sized enterprise category at the 2025 Sustainability Impact Awards, jointly organised by The Business Times and UOB.
Where it all began
Excess inventory is stock that goes beyond what customers are likely to buy. It can arise from deliberate overproduction to avoid stock-outs, customers returning goods, or operations that damage products.
Liyana Sulaiman, Pollen’s co-founder and chief product and technology officer, noted that a manufacturer or retailer that accumulates too much excess inventory will have no warehouse space for its next batch of goods, so it must pay to dispose of these products.
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The disposed inventory often ends up in landfills, where decomposition generates liquids that seep into the ground and irrigation channels, affecting soil quality and water supplies, she said. “We’re talking about environmental damage for generations.”
Pollen’s chief of staff, Tan Yang En, added that excess inventory is sometimes incinerated before its ashes are sent to landfills, a process that generates carbon emissions.
Sulaiman first witnessed the disposal of excess inventory at a retail warehouse where her father worked – migrant workers were cutting up Nike shoes and dumping them into 20-foot containers. “That was really shocking to me as a 17-year-old,” she said.
Fast-forward to 2017, and she found “a large amount of slippers” in a warehouse while helping Havaianas clear its stock in Singapore, as the footwear brand scaled back its operations here.
She wondered why perfectly good products were being wasted, and believed data and technology could help companies achieve better cost recovery from excess inventory, while protecting the environment.
With this in mind, she co-founded Pollen in 2018 with David Ng, who is now the startup’s chief executive officer.
From marketplace to metrics
Sulaiman said that, in its first four years, Pollen brought sellers and buyers of excess inventory together on an online marketplace, to assess whether such deals can actually happen.
She soon realised the marketplace had too many different products and buyers, each with their own purchasing practices, logistics costs and profit margins. “Some kind of system” was necessary to match sellers and buyers efficiently, she said.
From 2022 to 2024, Pollen used more than one billion data points from past transactions it had facilitated to develop the Pollen Slob – short for slow-moving and obsolete stock – Index.
Ng said this index helps sellers and buyers visualise the price and demand of different types of excess inventory as their value depreciates over time.
Pollen also launched a liquidation management system: a platform for sellers to upload and manage their inventory. These listings would then be marketed to potential buyers.
Scaling the clean-up with AI
In late 2023, Pollen realised that its liquidation services “have the potential to scale with artificial intelligence” (AI), but needed some venture capital funding, Ng said.
The startup went on to secure an undisclosed seed round from Insignia Ventures Partners and developed Lily, an AI platform that automates the workings of its liquidation management system.
The platform particularly caters to sellers that lack the manpower for manual operations. “So you don’t have to do data entry, you don’t have to even use the system,” said Ng.
Lily functions as an orchestrator of three AI agents: Dahlia, which predicts the demand of sellers’ excess inventory; Fern, which determines the best price to maximise cost recovery; and Sage, which finds the optimal sales channel, covering distribution route and buyer type.
By uploading files that contain data on their excess inventory, sellers can get the AI agents to calculate demand, pricing and sales channels. They can also ask questions such as whether a demand projection has considered seasonality.
Pollen deployed Dahlia and Fern earlier this year; Tan said the startup intends to launch the full Lily platform in the next few months.
Global ambitions
Currently, Pollen has more than 20 employees in offices across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Thailand.
Its online marketplace hosts nearly a hundred sellers, with about US$18 million worth of listings each month. Close to 80 per cent of these listings are personal care, home and beauty products. The rest range from food, fashion and electronics to other items.
There are also a few hundred buyers, from small resellers that purchase about 20 to 50 cartons of products to bulk traders that buy one or two containers at a time.
Ng said that in the first half of 2026, Pollen may do another venture capital round, and its valuation is expected to increase by two to four times.
Sulaiman added that the startup also hopes to go beyond private sector players and work with governments around the world to “tackle the problem of product waste head-on”.
This could include awarding carbon credits to manufacturers that “do a good job” in reporting their emissions, she noted.
Pollen also “sees a big opportunity in Japan” next year, she said, citing an electronics company and a household cleaner manufacturer facing problems in selling excess inventory.
Sulaiman expects “huge demand” for buying excess Japanese goods. “Who doesn’t love Japanese products?”
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