copper
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Tim Cherkasov
Tim Cherkasov is the co-founder and CEO of Trace (YC S25), an AI-native workflow orchestration platform that routes tasks between human teams and AI agents. A serial founder since age 17 with a fintech and data science background, he built and shut down the crypto-portfolio startup Clustr before pivoting into Trace, which topped the YC Launchpad leaderboard for the Summer 2025 cohort and raised a $3M seed round in early 2026.
Ranulfo Allen
Ranulfo (Randy) Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Still Bright, a New Jersey deep-tech startup using a vanadium-based electrochemical process to pull refined copper out of ore - and out of mine waste - at room temperature and pressure, no smelter required. A Princeton-trained chemical engineer with a Stanford PhD and a Dartmouth MBA, Allen spent years on the other side of the table as a venture investor and startup mentor before deciding to build the thing himself. Still Bright raised an $18.7M seed in 2025 led by Material Impact and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, betting that the looming copper shortage is solvable if you stop burning rock and start running electricity through it.
Steve Holm
Steve Holm is the CEO of Copper, a Google Workspace-native CRM serving professional services firms. One of Copper's founding team members - employee #4 - he spent five years helping grow the company from concept to $25M ARR before leaving to gain scale experience at Dropbox and Podium. He returned in August 2023 as a boomerang CEO to lead a product-focused turnaround, refocusing Copper on agencies, consulting firms, and relationship-centric businesses.
Kurt House
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.
Turner Caldwell
Turner Caldwell is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, a San Francisco-based startup rewriting the rulebook on how critical minerals are found, dug up, and refined. After nearly a decade ascending Tesla's battery supply chain from factory design to heading the metals and minerals team, Caldwell left to build Mariana in 2024. The company now operates Copper One in southeastern Utah - the world's first mine running autonomous haul trucks, robotic drills, and AI-driven refining under a single proprietary operating system called MarianaOS. Backed by a16z, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Khosla Ventures with $85M in Series A funding, Mariana targets 10 mineral projects in 10 years, compressing a timeline that traditionally stretches 15+ years for a single mine.