Copenhagen’s Rodinia Generation Raises €4 Million to Open Its First Full-Scale Clothing Factory in Portugal

Rodinia Generation, a Copenhagen company that has developed an automated system for making clothes on demand, has raised €4 million (about $4.5 million) to take that system to commercial scale, starting with its first full-scale factory in Portugal, planned for early 2027. The round was led by Vitamin°C, an early-stage climate venture fund based in Zurich and San Francisco, with Rodinia’s existing investors Climentum Capital and EIFO, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, also taking part, the company said in a statement on Monday 5 October that was reported by EU-Startups and WWD.

Rodinia says the money will go into scaling what it calls its patented O-Factory technology, with the Portuguese plant as its first industrial-scale site after a pilot line that has run in Copenhagen since 2021. “We have demonstrated in Copenhagen that a single O-factory line can produce 80% of clothing categories, including evening dresses, formal shirts, football tees, swimwear and childrenswear, just to mention a few of the categories that have already achieved competitive margins,” said Trine Young, the company’s founder and chief executive. “The investment allows Rodinia to increase production capacity for existing and new brands with the opening of our industrial-scale O-factory in Portugal.”

Sources: Rodinia Generation statement of 5 October 2026 as reported by EU-Startups, WWD and ArcticStartup; EU-Startups, 24 April 2024; rodiniageneration.io.

No site named yet

The company has not said where in Portugal the factory will be, how much it will produce, how many people it will employ or whether it will work with a Portuguese partner. Its website lists two locations: the headquarters and O-Factory lab in Copenhagen, and a Portuguese O-Factory marked “to be announced 2027”. Searches for the name Rodinia on the Portuguese company databases nif.pt and Racius on 12 October returned no company. Rodinia also did not disclose the valuation or how the round was split between the three investors, ArcticStartup reported on Thursday 8 October.

From a Copenhagen pilot to brand collections

Young founded Rodinia in 2017, and its pilot O-Factory opened in Copenhagen in 2021. According to the company, the Copenhagen line has produced for fashion brands since then and is currently making the next collections for Henrik Vibskov and Klaus Samsøe. When Rodinia raised €3 million from EIFO and Climentum Capital in April 2024, it named the sportswear brand Hummel, Mads Nørgaard Copenhagen and the children’s clothing brand Wheat among its customers, and EU-Startups quoted Young describing the process: “We source quality textiles which we print, cure and cut in an automated process without any water or toxic chemicals. Then we have the garments sewn locally.” The company now describes the O-Factory as combining proprietary software, proprietary machinery and selected outside technologies, with production settings adjusting to the digital file of each garment.

The company’s claims

Rodinia’s case rests on speed, cost and environmental footprint, and the figures are its own. It says its production process uses no water and that an O-factory cuts CO2e emissions by about 40 percent for an average garment; the headline figure on its website is a 36 percent water saving per average garment. On the company’s impact calculations, O-factories producing the equivalent of half the annual garment volume of a large fast-fashion brand would save about 100 billion litres of water and one million tonnes of CO2e a year compared with conventional production. Vitamin°C’s portfolio page describes the system as producing ready-to-wear garments in 48 hours and “enabling nearshore manufacturing at cost parity with Asia”. The 80 percent figure has limits that Rodinia sets out itself: its FAQ lists categories it does not offer at the moment, among them knitwear, socks, lingerie, uniforms, wool coats and puffer jackets, and performance wear for sports such as skiing and diving.

“What attracted us is not sustainability alone, but the potential to change the economics of apparel production by combining automation, flexibility and local manufacturing at commercial scale,” said Nathalie Moral, founding partner of Vitamin°C, which describes itself as a female-led fund investing in climate mitigation and adaptation, with tickets of €0.5 million to €1.5 million. Climentum Capital, which invests in climate hard tech with a focus on the Nordics and the DACH region of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and EIFO were also the investors in Rodinia’s April 2024 round.

Portugal’s clothing base

Rodinia has not said publicly why it chose Portugal; ArcticStartup described the plant as the next step in bringing apparel manufacturing closer to European fashion brands. Portugal already has a large clothing industry. Its textile and clothing exports were €5,499 million in 2025, 0.8 percent less than in 2024, with clothing accounting for €3,178 million, according to provisional INE data reported by the news agency Lusa in February; Ana Dinis, director-general of the industry association ATP, told the agency that the sector has about 12,000 companies, many of them small. Nordic fashion buys a share of that output. Sweden’s H&M Group lists 63 factories in Portugal on its supplier list, more than in any other EU country, and clothing is the largest category of Danish imports from Portugal, worth DKK 431.6 million (about €58 million) in January to August 2026, 17.0 percent more than a year earlier, according to Statistics Denmark figures published on 9 October that update the series NorthSouth HQ analysed in September.

Rodinia’s plan follows another Nordic textile-technology move into Portuguese production: on 17 September Finland’s Spinnova signed a non-binding letter of intent to acquire Tearfil, the Guimarães yarn spinner that has partnered it in developing its wood-based fibre, as NorthSouth HQ reported.

What to watch

The site, the size of the plant and the first brands to produce there have yet to be named, and the cost claim is the one most likely to be tested. Fibre2Fashion, the textile trade publication, wrote that Portugal “should provide its clearest commercial test yet”, and Dealroom’s summary of the round noted that matching Asian labour costs through automation “is unproven at scale”. Rodinia’s longer-term plan is a network of O-factories close to fashion brands’ main markets. “By replicating flexible production capacity across different locations, we are creating the foundation for a new manufacturing infrastructure for the global apparel industry,” Young said. Danish companies already operating in Portugal are listed in the NorthSouth HQ directory of Danish companies in Portugal.