The first marketplace that pays per AI-verified piece of litter
Litter Gig replaces $35-to-$50-an-hour litter contracts with verified piece-work: property owners pay one price per item the video proves was picked up and binned, workers earn a published rate on their own schedule, and every receipt carries the evidence. We are raising a seed round to close the launch gates, run paid pilots in Montgomery County, Maryland and the Washington, D.C. metro, and reach 60 paying properties by the end of 2027.
By the numbers
Pilot to date, live from the platform. Test and demo accounts are excluded.
- Verified items
- —
- Counted from video and settled
- Verified sessions
- —
- Settled by the server
- Workers
- —
- People with a verified session
- Platform fee
- 33%
- Litter Gig collects 1¢ for every 3¢ a worker earns
- Funded dollars · active owners
- At launch
- Payments run in test mode during the pilot; both are reported from the first live payment.
Litter is still everywhere, and removing it costs more every year
35 billion
pieces of litter on U.S. roadways, waterways and coasts, even after a 34% decline since 2020
Source: Keep America Beautiful, 2026 National Litter Study.
$11.5 billion
a year in direct litter cleanup costs, most of it paid by businesses
Source: Keep America Beautiful, National Visible Litter Survey and Litter Cost Study.
$17 million+
a year spent on litter by Maryland's DOT; North Carolina's DOT spent $22.85 million in 2025
Source: AASHTO, The Leaflet, "The Rising Cost of Roadside Trash Removal" (August–September 2026).
$35–$50
an hour charged by litter-only lot services, billed whether or not litter is removed
Source: interviews with the founder of Cleanlots (2017, 2019).
Property owners pay for time, not results, and nobody can verify the work. Public costs are rising fastest: Arkansas reports litter costs up more than 50% in three years.
Per-item cleanup, now that verification is cheap
Litter Gig sells litter pickup per verified item. A property owner draws a boundary and funds a balance; a local worker films the cleanup on a phone mounted to a grabber; our software counts each piece, checks it against the boundary and the disposal video, and bills one price per verified item.
Verification got cheap
Video AI can now audit piece-work for under a cent per verified item, a level that made per-item pay impossible to verify two years ago.
Gig work is mainstream
72.9 million Americans did independent work in 2025 (MBO Partners). Self-scheduled piece-work paid per verified item fits the way they already work.
Buyers want proof
Property owners, watershed programs and municipal budgets increasingly require documented outcomes. Every Litter Gig receipt carries the video and the per-item GPS credit.
Plastic is on the agenda
The EPA placed microplastics on its draft Contaminant Candidate List 6 in April 2026, the first time in the list's history. The cheapest interception point is a piece of litter before it reaches a storm drain.
A production platform with pilot data
Three codebases shipped by one founder with AI-assisted development, a provisional patent on the verification and settlement method, and live numbers from the pilot.
Pilot to date · live from the platform
Sessions verified
—
Completed and verified
Litter removed
—
AI-counted items
AI verifications
—
Verifier runs
Workers
—
People with a recorded session
Simple unit economics
33% platform fee: Litter Gig collects 1¢ for every 3¢ a worker earns.
4¢
the owner pays per verified item
3¢
the worker earns per verified item
1¢
Litter Gig collects: a 33% platform fee
| Line | 150 items | 250 items (500 an hour) |
|---|---|---|
| Owner pays | $6.00 | $10.00 |
| Worker earns | $4.50 | $7.50 |
| Litter Gig keeps | $1.50 | $2.50 |
| Variable cost (verification, video storage, payments) | about $1.13 | about $1.13 |
| Contribution | $0.37 | $1.37 |
Verification is priced by the minute of video, not by the item, so the cost per verified item falls as workers get faster: about 0.75¢ an item at 150 items in half an hour, about 0.45¢ at 250.
Variable cost is the reference session from our engineering cost model (September 13, 2026), with verification re-measured on October 1, 2026. Verification list prices rise on January 1, 2027.
Lean by design
- Under $50 a month to run before scale: hosting, database, email and app stores.
- Founder-built with AI-assisted development: the Android app, the iOS app and the web platform.
- No fleet, no payroll, no dispatchers: workers are independent contractors who choose when and where to work, with their own phones.
- Public cleanups are verified on our own hardware at no API cost; paid sessions are verified in the cloud for cents.
Launch on evidence, not on a date
Step 1: Build the smallest thing that can be paid on
Three production apps, balance-backed funding and server-side settlement, tested in a pilot in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Step 2: Measure what matters
Every change to how items are counted is tested against a human-counted benchmark before it ships, and items an hour are measured on full-length real sessions before we publish them.
Step 3: Expand only on numbers
Public launch waits on the launch gates: live payments and payouts, background checks and published items an hour. Then one county at a time: 25 paying properties and 100 active workers in Montgomery County, then 60 properties across the D.C. metro by the end of 2027.
A large market, bought locally
- U.S. landscaping services
- $196 billion (2026); maintenance is about 44% of it, the contracts litter is bundled into today
- Source: Mordor Intelligence, United States Landscaping Market (2026).
- U.S. commercial grounds maintenance
- $41.6 billion (2026)
- Source: The Business Research Company (2026).
- Direct litter cleanup
- at least $11.5 billion a year
- Source: Keep America Beautiful.
- Buyers
- about 373,000 community associations, about 115,000 shopping centers and about 19,500 municipal governments
- Source: Foundation for Community Association Research (2025); ICSC.
Litter pickup is already a paid, recurring line item for almost every commercial property and municipality, so Litter Gig replaces existing spend instead of asking for a new budget. The buyers are fragmented and local, the shape marketplaces serve well.
Where the $500,000 goes
An 18-month plan. Click a sector for the detail.
Allocation
35%
Go-to-Market & Pilots
Click sectors of the chart to drill down into deployment metrics.
Go-to-Market & Pilots (35% - $175,000)
Winning Montgomery County, Maryland first: intro-priced pilots for property owners on automatic top-up, with retail centers, apartment communities and community associations through regional property-management firms, then municipal parks, with schools and employers as the worker-supply and events channel.
Who is building it
Advisors commit about ten hours a week. The first hires after the round are a community and operations manager and a sales lead for property managers and municipalities.
Kyle Hughes
Founder & CEO, full time. Architected and built the Android, iOS and web platform; inventor on the provisional patent.
Christopher Sloop
Board Member, Technical Advisor and angel investor. CTO, Whisker Labs.
Jeff Hughes
Board Member, Business Development. Leads property-management, enterprise and municipal outreach.
Jalen Savoy
Environmental Specialist. Municipal parks litter-program experience; measurement and reporting.
Request the plan
The full business plan with sources, the two-page executive summary and the financial model, including pricing, unit economics, market sizing, competition, the financial base case and milestones, are available to accredited investors, grant reviewers and municipal partners on request. Tell us who you are and we will send them within two business days.
This page is for information only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Any offering is made only to eligible investors through definitive documents.