Almost every family that has owned LEGO\u00ae bricks eventually encounters the same problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sets disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bricks do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A spaceship becomes part of a castle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A castle becomes part of a car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instructions disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pieces migrate between boxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And after enough years, what once cost hundreds or thousands of euros becomes a large container of mixed plastic sitting under a bed or in a cupboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bricks are still perfectly usable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The value is still there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But recovering it manually can require hours \u2014 or days \u2014 of sorting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lithuanian startup Sort A Brick is building a machine for that problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What began as an idea for automatically sorting mixed LEGO bricks is evolving into something considerably larger: industrial refurbishment infrastructure for second-hand toys<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company uses proprietary computer vision, physical AI and purpose-built industrial machinery to identify, clean and sort mixed bricks, determine which original sets can be reconstructed, source missing pieces and turn old collections back into complete, verified, ready-to-build products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And in autumn 2026, the model is entering a new stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick is no longer only offering to restore customers’ collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is launching a marketplace for refurbished LEGO sets<\/strong>, bringing buying, restoration and selling under the same platform. Public sales of its first batches are scheduled to begin on October 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bigger ambition is becoming clear:<\/p>\n\n\n\n make used toys refurbishable at industrial scale.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea came from an extremely ordinary family problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the co-founders was confronted with thousands of his son’s mixed LEGO bricks and the tedious task of sorting them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There had to be a better way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That question eventually became Sort A Brick. The Lithuanian company was founded in 2023, with Ilya Malkin and Aurimas Slap\u0161ys<\/strong> among its founding team. Today the operating company, UAB BR1CK<\/strong>, is based in Lithuania and runs its processing operation from Terminalo Street in Kaunas district, while the company also identifies Vilnius as its headquarters and operates facilities there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The initial proposition was easy to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Send in a box of mixed bricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick cleans them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its system identifies the individual pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Software works out which sets can be rebuilt from the collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Missing parts can be added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The customer gets usable sets back instead of a box of chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It sounds almost trivial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The engineering required to make it economical is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LEGO’s strength as a product creates the problem Sort A Brick is trying to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The system is extremely standardized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pieces manufactured years apart can still fit together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sets contain hundreds or thousands of small components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many pieces look almost identical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some differ only by a tiny geometric feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Others differ by colour, print or generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick says its technology must work across more than 100,000 unique LEGO part types<\/strong>. One of its current physical-AI systems is being trained using more than 500 high-resolution images per part<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A human can identify bricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But humans are expensive, slow and inconsistent when asked to identify millions of them one by one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That creates the economic bottleneck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second-hand LEGO already has value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The difficulty is turning unsorted inventory into something a buyer can confidently purchase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A box of random bricks is one product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A complete, cleaned and verified retired LEGO set is a much more valuable one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The missing step is industrial processing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick’s answer is not just an AI model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a physical system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bricks move through purpose-built machinery where cameras capture them and computer-vision models identify what each piece is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Software connects those recognised parts to an inventory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That inventory can then be matched against the parts required for thousands of possible sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The machinery physically separates the pieces so they can eventually be assembled into complete collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick describes the technology as a combination of proprietary machinery, physical AI, data and software operating as one integrated system<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This distinction matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are many impressive computer-vision demonstrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The difficult part is making one work reliably inside an industrial process, repeatedly, with enough speed and low enough cost that the economics make sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick says its upcoming second-generation sorter is designed to process approximately one part per second<\/strong>, increase capacity around fivefold and reduce sorting costs by almost three times compared with its earlier system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the line between a clever hobby project and industrial automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At first, Sort A Brick could easily be described as a LEGO sorting service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That description is becoming too narrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company’s current positioning is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe refurbishment infrastructure for toy re-commerce at global scale.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That changes the way to look at the technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sorting is not the final product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sorting is one step in a larger refurbishment pipeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bricks come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are cleaned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inspected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inventoried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matched to possible sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Missing pieces are sourced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The set is completed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its contents are verified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the finished product becomes ready to build \u2014 or ready to sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is much closer to what already happens with refurbished phones, computers or industrial machinery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The difference is that the underlying product consists of hundreds or thousands of tiny plastic components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick is effectively asking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n if we can refurbish an iPhone, why can’t we refurbish a LEGO set?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Second-hand marketplaces have made it easy to buy almost anything from another person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But they introduce uncertainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is every piece there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Are the bricks clean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Are some damaged?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is the seller’s description correct?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Will the set arrive and turn out to be 95% complete?<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a complex building set, that missing 5% can destroy the experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick is trying to create a different category between new<\/em> and randomly used<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its refurbished-set proposition is built around three promises:<\/p>\n\n\n\n clean, complete and verified.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The company can take mixed bricks from multiple sources, reconstruct the original set, replace missing parts and then sell the result as a standardized refurbished product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That standardization may be the commercially important part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Re-commerce becomes much easier to scale when the buyer does not have to evaluate the reliability of every individual seller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reconstructing sets from old collections rarely produces perfect inventories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A piece was lost under a sofa ten years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another ended up in somebody else’s collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One broke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One disappeared into a vacuum cleaner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Sort A Brick promises a complete set, somebody has to find those missing pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company says it has already purchased more than 110,000 individual replacement parts<\/strong>, many from independent BrickLink sellers, with thousands of pieces arriving at its Vilnius operation each week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This reveals another layer of the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artificial intelligence can identify what is missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It cannot teleport the missing brick into the box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At scale, refurbishment becomes a supply-chain problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which parts are missing most often?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which should be held in inventory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which should be sourced externally?<\/p>\n\n\n\n How do you economically purchase hundreds of tiny components from many sellers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n How much inventory should be held before the working capital becomes too expensive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more the company grows, the more this logistics system can become part of its competitive advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the more unusual problems Sort A Brick has faced is not finding customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is processing them fast enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company’s current public profile reports more than 1,600 bookings from 40 countries and over 30,000 kilograms of bricks waiting in the queue<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earlier fundraising material described demand as running roughly 50 times ahead of monthly capacity<\/strong>, with more than 1,000 families already waiting and tonnes of bricks queued for restoration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By mid-2026, founder Ilya Malkin said the operation had moved to three shifts and was running 24 hours a day, seven days a week<\/strong>, yet at then-current capacity the backlog would still take years to clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is an unusual startup bottleneck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A SaaS company can often respond to a surge in customers by buying more computing capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick has to build machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Improve throughput.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organise shifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Handle physical inventory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Expand floor space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And make every processing step faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its growth therefore resembles manufacturing as much as software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Investors have been willing to fund the transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2024, Sort A Brick raised \u20ac1.15 million<\/strong> in a round backed by Baltic VC FIRSTPICK<\/strong>, business angels and the founders’ own capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the investors were well-known Lithuanian technology operators including Mantas Mikuckas<\/strong>, one of the founders of Vinted, alongside other angels and technology investors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The capital was aimed at developing the technology and expanding operations, including the company’s initial commercial launch in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The investment thesis was broader than simply building a clever sorting robot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Millions of valuable bricks already exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are durable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are standardized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And enormous quantities sit unused because the cost of sorting and reconstructing them exceeds what most families are willing to spend in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Automation potentially changes that equation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If someone wanted to build infrastructure for toy refurbishment, LEGO is close to an ideal first category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pieces are highly standardized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are durable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Individual components can be identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Original set inventories are known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The product has strong emotional value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also retains unusually high monetary value compared with many other toys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some sets become collectible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Retired sets can become more expensive rather than less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And a set manufactured years ago can still be perfectly usable today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That creates an unusually large gap between the value of the material and the value of the unsorted object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A pile of mixed bricks may look like clutter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exact same pieces, cleaned and reconstructed into complete sets, can be worth hundreds or thousands of euros.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick exists in that gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many companies describe themselves as part of the circular economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Sort A Brick, the loop is easy to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A family buys a set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The child builds it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It gets dismantled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bricks are mixed with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Years pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of producing another new set from new plastic, the existing bricks are cleaned, identified, reorganised and put back into use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company says its mission is to bring billions of neglected bricks back to life<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The environmental argument is helped by the physical characteristics of the product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LEGO bricks are extraordinarily durable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That durability is a waste problem when pieces are discarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is an asset when they can be reused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The challenge has never been whether the bricks survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The challenge is recovering them economically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company’s latest move makes the broader strategy much clearer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick has brought three activities together:<\/p>\n\n\n\n buy refurbished sets;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n restore your own collection;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n sell unused bricks to Sort A Brick.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This creates the beginnings of a closed-loop system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone who has no interest in rebuilding their old collection can sell the bricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick can process them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its systems determine what can be reconstructed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Missing parts are sourced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The finished sets enter the refurbished marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another family buys them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What had been dead inventory in one household becomes a usable product in another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company plans releases of new batches of refurbished sets every two weeks, with the first public sales under its new storefront beginning in October 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That means Sort A Brick is no longer dependent only on people paying to have their own collections sorted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It can increasingly become the merchant itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a tendency for almost every startup today to describe itself as an AI company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick is an interesting counterexample because the need for AI is unusually concrete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without automated recognition, the economics are difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If people have to identify every individual brick manually, labour dominates the refurbishment cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If computer vision can identify those pieces reliably and machinery can process them quickly, the cost curve changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The AI does not exist to make the product sound modern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It exists to remove a human task that otherwise prevents the business model from scaling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That applied approach was recognised in the 2025 European AI Awards<\/strong>, where Sort A Brick was named a winner in the AI Business category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2026, it also won the Harvard Business School Alumni New Venture Competition for Europe & International<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a startup working on what initially sounds like an oddly specific problem, those awards signal that the technology and business model are being viewed more broadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick is still small.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Public Lithuanian records show UAB BR1CK with around 16 employees<\/strong> in 2026. The same records show the company is still firmly in its investment stage rather than operating as a mature profitable business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That matters when looking at the current scale claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not yet a giant refurbishment factory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a deep-tech startup trying to build one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its current constraint is precisely the thing it is inventing: the machinery and process capable of handling enough physical volume at sufficiently low cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next-generation sorting system, expanded processing capacity and new recommerce platform are all parts of solving the same problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Can an operation that today processes tonnes eventually process hundreds or thousands of tonnes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most interesting question is what happens if the infrastructure works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick currently starts with LEGO because it is an unusually attractive refurbishment category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the company’s own positioning is no longer limited to bricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It describes itself as building refurbishment infrastructure for toy re-commerce at global scale<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That implies a larger thesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second-hand marketplaces solved one part of re-commerce:<\/p>\n\n\n\n they made it easy for a buyer and seller to find each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They did not solve refurbishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For many categories, a used product still needs to be inspected, cleaned, identified, repaired, completed, graded or repackaged before it becomes a trustworthy standardized product again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today much of that work is manual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If physical AI and industrial automation can perform more of it economically, re-commerce can move beyond peer-to-peer listings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The future second-hand marketplace may look less like a classified-ad site and more like a reverse factory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Products come in disorganised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Machines understand what they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The system restores their value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And they go back out as standardized products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The original Sort A Brick idea could be explained in one sentence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n send us your mixed LEGO bricks and a machine will sort them.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Three years later, that no longer captures the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has developed proprietary computer vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Built industrial sorting machinery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Created a cleaning and inventory process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Developed software for reconstructing sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Built supply chains for missing pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Accumulated tens of tonnes of customer inventory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moved operations toward 24\/7 processing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And is now launching a marketplace for verified refurbished sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The machine still matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the real opportunity surrounding it has become much larger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sort A Brick is trying to turn what was previously an economically impractical pile of used pieces into standardized inventory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If it succeeds, the company will have built more than a LEGO sorter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It will have demonstrated something much more interesting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n that physical AI can make refurbishment itself scalable.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n And that could turn the boxes of forgotten toys sitting in millions of homes from waste into something much closer to inventory waiting to be rediscovered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost every family that has owned LEGO\u00ae bricks eventually encounters the same problem. The sets disappear. The bricks do not. A spaceship becomes part of a castle. A castle becomes part of a car. Instructions disappear. Pieces migrate between boxes. And after enough years, what once cost hundreds or thousands of euros becomes a large […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpulse.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}It started with a box of bricks<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Humans are very bad at sorting 100,000 kinds of pieces<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Computer vision meets a conveyor belt<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The real product may be refurbishment<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Used does not have to mean uncertain<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Missing pieces create their own logistics problem<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Demand arrived before capacity<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\u20ac1.15 million to industrialise the idea<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
LEGO is an unusually good place to start<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The circular-economy story is unusually literal<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The business is now becoming a marketplace<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
AI is useful because the physical economics require it<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A small company building an industrial operation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
LEGO may only be the first category<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The sorter was only the beginning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n