Last summer, mining startup KoBold made a splash when it said it had discovered in Zambia one of the world’s largest copper deposits in more than a decade.
Now, another startup, Earth AI, exclusively told TechCrunch about its own discovery: promising deposits of critical minerals in parts of Australia that other mining outfits had ignored for decades. While it’s still not known whether they are as large as KoBold’s, the news suggests that future supplies of critical minerals are likely to emerge from a combination of field data parsed by artificial intelligence.
“The actual, real frontier [in mining] is not so much geographical as it is technological,” Roman Teslyuk, founder and CEO of Earth AI, told TechCrunch.
Earth AI has identified deposits of copper, cobalt, and gold in the Northern Territory and silver, molybdenum, and tin at another site in New South Wales, 310 miles (500 kilometers) northwest of Sydney.
Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk’s graduate studies. Teslyuk, a native of Ukraine, was working toward a doctorate at the University of Sydney, where he became familiar with the mining industry in Australia. There, the government owns the rights to mineral deposits, and it leases them in six-year terms. Since the 1970s, he said, exploration companies are required to submit their data to a national archive.
“For some reason, nobody’s using them,” he said. “If I could build an algorithm that can absorb all that knowledge and learn from the failures and successes of millions of geologists in the past, I can make much better predictions about where to find minerals in the future.”
Teslyuk started Earth AI as a software company focused on making predictions about potential deposits, then approaching customers who might be interested in exploring sites further. But the customers were hesitant to invest, in part because they didn’t want to bet millions on the predictions of an unproven technology.
“Mining is a very conservative industry,” Teslyuk said. “Everything outside of the approved dogma is considered heresy.”
So Earth AI decided to develop its own drilling equipment to prove that the sites it identified were as promising as its software suggested. The company was accepted to Y Combinator’s spring 2019 cohort, and it spent the next few years refining its hardware and software. In January, Earth AI raised a $20 million Series B.
Though the company uses AI to search for minerals like KoBold, Teslyuk says it takes a different tack. Earth AI’s algorithms, he said, are trained to scan wide areas quickly and efficiently to find deposits that might otherwise have been overlooked.
“The way we used to explore for metals in the past, the 20th century, it just takes very, very long. It takes decades to find something,” Teslyuk said. “With the modern pace of the world, you just can’t wait for that long.”
