The physical metals trader that runs on data - digitizing one of the world's oldest and most opaque markets.
THE SUBJECT: Open Mineral AG, photographed as its wordmark - a Swiss trading house that behaves like a software company, matching miners and smelters through pricing algorithms rather than phone calls.
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars of metal raw materials change hands - copper concentrate from a mine in Chile, zinc from Peru, lead and precious metals bound for smelters in Asia. For most of the industry's history, those deals have been struck the same way: over the phone, through brokers, on the strength of relationships built over decades. Prices are quoted privately. Terms are negotiated in the dark. Open Mineral was built to change that.
Founded in 2017 in Baar, in the Swiss canton of Zug, Open Mineral is part physical trader and part digital marketplace. It buys and sells physical metal concentrates and raw materials, and it does so on top of a proprietary layer of data, pricing algorithms and optimization tools. The company describes itself plainly as an "AI-powered physical commodity trader" - a firm that trades real cargoes of metal but treats data as its core advantage.
The founders knew the problem intimately. Boris Eykher and Ilya Chernilovskiy both came from Glencore, the largest commodity trading house in the world. They had seen where the friction lived - in matching buyers and sellers, in pricing complex concentrates, in the logistics and financing that surround every shipment - and they set out to build for exactly those points.
Defining the future of commodity trading through data and AI disruption.
Open Mineral's customers are the participants of the metals supply chain themselves: mining companies looking to sell concentrate, smelters and refiners looking to buy feed, and traders in between. More than 900 metals and mining companies across 40-plus countries have been onboarded to its network.
These are B2B counterparties trading in base metals such as copper, zinc and lead; precious metals like gold and silver; and the battery and transition metals - nickel, cobalt - that the energy shift is making increasingly critical.
In concentrates trading, information asymmetry has long been the business model. Pricing is complex, deal flow is fragmented, and access depends on who you know. Smaller miners and smelters can struggle to reach the right counterparty at a fair price.
Open Mineral's answer is to make the market more legible: connect buyers and sellers more directly, expose pricing logic through algorithms, and standardize the data around each deal - from marketability assessment to logistics and KYC compliance.
A marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of physical metal concentrates, enabling more direct, efficient and transparent trade across base, precious and battery metals.
An in-house trader handling procurement, financing, logistics and distribution of raw and refined metals, plus paper/derivatives trading to manage price risk.
Proprietary pricing algorithms and automated blending tools that help counterparties optimize material value - and reduce carbon footprint in the process.
Metals pricing, trend and marketability intelligence, incorporating third-party "green" ESG metrics across both the buy-side and the sell-side.
Open Mineral is a hybrid. It earns trading margins on physical transactions - buying raw concentrates and selling to smelters and refiners - supported by financing and logistics services. Its data and platform layer improves deal-matching, pricing and optimization, so revenue scales with trading volume rather than pure software subscriptions.
That structure is unusual: most players are either trading houses or software vendors. Open Mineral is a trader that builds its own AI and data-science stack in-house.
The traditional giants - Glencore, Trafigura, Mercuria - built their edge on scale and private information. Digital challengers like MineHub and Metalshub attack the software side. Open Mineral sits between them, pairing a live trading book with marketplace technology.
Its differentiation is domain expertise turned into code: founders who traded these exact materials, encoding what they knew into pricing and blending algorithms rather than starting from a generic demo.
| Round | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Series B | USD 5.5M | Nov 2018 |
| Series C | USD 33M | Sep 2021 |
| Total raised | USD 40M+ | - |
Series C was led by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company, with Statkraft Ventures and Lingfeng Capital joining existing backers Xploration Capital and Emerald Technology Ventures.
Bars scaled to Series C. Figures per public reporting.
Ex-Glencore traders Boris Eykher and Ilya Chernilovskiy launch Open Mineral AG in Zug, Switzerland.
Emerald Technology Ventures and existing shareholders back the young trading platform.
Recognized among the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers for modernizing metals trading.
A landmark round led by Mubadala fuels global expansion of the digital trade platform.
Sharpens its identity as an AI-powered physical commodity trader across base, precious and battery metals.
The energy transition runs on metal. Electrification demands copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium at volumes the world has never mined before - and every ounce moves through a trading layer that, in large part, still operates on relationships and paperwork. That gap between a modernizing demand side and an analog trading process is precisely where Open Mineral has positioned itself.
It is not trying to out-scale Glencore, nor to be a pure SaaS vendor. It occupies the middle: a working trading book that generates real deal flow, wrapped in data infrastructure that makes each transaction more transparent and efficient. For a smaller miner in an emerging market, that can mean reaching the right smelter at a fairer price. For a smelter, it can mean better-optimized feed and clearer ESG credentials.
The credibility of a trading firm rests on who is behind the book, and Open Mineral's founding story is central to how it operates. Boris Eykher, co-founder and chief executive, and Ilya Chernilovskiy both cut their teeth at Glencore, learning the concentrates business at the largest commodity trader on the planet. That background matters: pricing a shipment of copper or zinc concentrate is not a matter of a single spot number but of dozens of variables - metal content, impurities, treatment and refining charges, payable terms, moisture, logistics. Encoding that into software requires people who have priced it by hand first.
Around the founders, Open Mineral has assembled a team of roughly 60 that blends commodity-trading veterans with data scientists and engineers. The firm operates as an internationally distributed, remote-friendly organization, with a presence spanning Europe, Asia and Latin America and a leadership footprint that has reached into the Gulf following its Mubadala-led round. That mix - traders who understand the physical flow, technologists who can model it - is the expertise the company is built to compound.
Recognition has followed. Open Mineral was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2019 and has been acknowledged in the S&P Global Platts Global Metals Awards, markers that signal the industry takes its attempt at digitization seriously rather than dismissing it as a startup novelty. For a sector where trust is currency, those credentials are part of the product.
Former Glencore trader who leads Open Mineral's strategy and its bet that data, not private information, is the next edge in commodity trading.
Also from Glencore, bringing deep concentrates-trading expertise that shapes the firm's pricing and optimization logic.