For nearly 30 years EMX Royalty did the unglamorous half of mining - it found the ground, then let someone else dig. The payoff was a royalty machine that grew about 17% a year and ended in a US$456 million merger.

Open Mineral is a Swiss-based, AI-driven metals trading firm and digital marketplace that connects miners, smelters, and traders to buy and sell physical metal raw materials - such as copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver concentrates - directly and transparently. Founded in 2017 by former Glencore traders, the company pairs a physical trading desk with proprietary data and pricing algorithms to digitize a historically opaque, relationship-driven industry, and has onboarded hundreds of mining and metals companies across dozens of countries.