Tricia Carey, the former chief commercial officer for circular fabric innovator Renewcell, could have played it safe when she found herself out of a job in July 2024. With a professional network spanning companies such as Gap, H&M and Under Armor, she might have easily landed a new gig at a well-established fashion brand.

Instead, less than a year after Renewcell’s bankruptcy, she’s taking a risk with another early-stage startup, Avalo, which uses artificial intelligence to breed climate-resilient crops. She’ll be the evangelist: meeting with farmers, mills, spinners and brands to sell them on the approach.

“I’m a relationship builder,” she said on the latest episode of the Climate Pioneers interview series. “I love innovation, and I actually really like starting with things from scratch. You can build versus remodel, which you often have to do in a large global enterprise.”

The 6-year-old company has raised almost $15 million, including $11 million in March, to cultivate seed strains that use less water and fertilizer than conventional plants. Carey was hired to expand Avalo’s focus beyond sugarcane, rice and other commodities into cotton, fashion’s second most used fabric. It drinks 3 percent of the water used for agricultural purposes and is responsible for 10 percent of worldwide pesticide use.

“The industry is going through an incredible transition right now, and it’s never been a more exciting time to be a part of the textile and apparel industry,” she said. “We’ve got policy coming at us. We have now a lot happening within the tariff world. We’ve got the technology coming in. We have disruption from new entrants into the market, and so it really gives us a chance to rebuild and to do it the right way.”

Cotton was also at the center of Carey’s job at Renewcell, which sought to replace the use of virgin cotton with an alternative called Circulose made out of recycled cotton scraps. As chief commercial officer, Carey signed H&M and the parent companies for Tommy Hilfiger and Zara as clients. But longstanding supply chain practices and high production costs forced Renewcell into bankruptcy. Its intellectual property was acquired by a private equity firm and lives on in a renamed company, Circulose.

A fashionable career

Carey will try to connect Avalo with the network she built over 25 years with Lenzing, the company behind Tencel, a breakthrough wood-based textile designed to reduce the environmental impacts of fashion. There, she helped convince brands including Gap, Levi’s and Under Armour to source the fabric. Carey’s career began in the New York fashion district, inspired by her childhood wardrobe of handmade clothes.

“I learned how to sew because if I didn’t like [a garment], I was going to fix it,” she said. “That got me interested in textiles at an early age.”

Carey gravitated to startups later because they can be more nimble than companies struggling to transition in step with shifting consumer expectations. Although she sometimes misses Lenzing’s resources, she relishes the chance to share her mistakes and shortcuts with less-established companies.

Avalo’s appeal to cotton farmers centers on answering this question: How can they grow the most profitable crop as soil health deteriorates and water supplies be