Tagged: mining
20 results
Ackcio
Ackcio is a Singapore deep-tech company that builds reliable wireless data acquisition systems for industrial monitoring. Its flagship Ackcio Beam platform uses a patented long-range, self-healing wireless mesh network to connect geotechnical and structural sensors on construction sites, mines, dams, rail lines and other infrastructure - replacing manual readings and fragile cabling with automated, real-time data that works even underground and off the grid.
MyPass Global
MyPass Global is an Australian B2B SaaS company that runs a worker-owned digital Skills Passport and compliance platform for highly regulated, high-risk industries such as mining, oil and gas, energy and construction. Workers store verified qualifications, licences, medicals and background checks in one place and grant employers permission to view them, while site owners and contractors get real-time visibility of workforce compliance. Founded by Matt Smith and headquartered in Perth and Sydney, the platform serves more than 1,500 organisations and over 160,000 verified workers, and raised a A$7.5M Series A led by OneVentures in February 2025 to expand across the Americas.
Unleash live
Unleash live is a Sydney-based enterprise computer vision company that turns live video and imagery from drones, CCTV, IP cameras and mobile devices into real-time, actionable insights. Its cloud and edge platform runs a library of AI models to inspect critical infrastructure - power lines, wind turbines, solar farms, rail, roads and industrial sites - detecting faults, corrosion and equipment wear so utilities, transport authorities and resource companies can inspect assets faster and safer. Alongside the core platform it offers Autofly for automated drone and robot inspections and an AI App marketplace for building and deploying custom vision models.
Allonnia
Allonnia is a Boston-based environmental biotechnology company that uses biology and engineered systems to solve stubborn contamination and resource-recovery problems. Spun out of Ginkgo Bioworks' Ferment Consortium in 2020, it removes PFAS from water at scale using SAFF foam-fractionation technology and is commercializing biological methods to recover critical minerals and rare earth elements from ore. The company has raised more than $100 million to bring 'bio-ingenuity' to water treatment and mining.
Nicole Richards
Nicole Richards is the founding CEO of Allonnia, a Boston-based synthetic biology company that engineers microbes to destroy forever chemicals like PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, and to pull critical minerals out of ore and waste streams. A chemical engineer with nearly three decades in water, mining and specialty chemicals, she spun Allonnia out of Ginkgo Bioworks' Ferment Consortium in 2020 with a $40M Series A and has since raised more than $109M in total funding.
SiTration, Inc.
SiTration is a Cambridge, Massachusetts materials-recovery company spun out of MIT that uses a patented, ultra-durable porous silicon membrane paired with electro-extraction to pull critical metals - lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and precious metals - out of mining waste, spent lithium-ion batteries, and refining streams. By replacing chemical-heavy, acid-dissolution processes with a tunable, energy-efficient membrane, SiTration aims to make the recovery of the metals behind batteries, EV motors, wind turbines, and data centers cheaper and cleaner.
Still Bright
Still Bright is a Newark, New Jersey hard-tech company reinventing how the world makes copper. Its patented RACER process (Rapid and Complete Electrochemical Reduction) soaks copper-bearing ore and mine waste in a vanadium-based solution that pulls the metal out in minutes at room temperature and pressure, then uses electricity to regenerate the solution - a trick borrowed from vanadium flow batteries. The result: up to 99% copper recovery with equipment that runs 70-90% cheaper than traditional smelters and produces no toxic emissions. Founded in 2022 by CEO Randy Allen and CTO Jon Vardner, the company raised $18.7M in seed funding in 2025 and is scaling toward pilot production of domestic, clean copper.
Brendan Smith
Brendan Smith is the co-founder and CEO of SiTration, an MIT spinout commercializing a tunable silicon membrane that recovers critical metals like copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium from mining waste and spent batteries without the mountains of chemicals the old way demands. A materials scientist who came to MIT from Canada in 2013, he turned a desalination-lab discovery into a venture-backed company that has raised roughly $14.4 million and partnered with mining giant Rio Tinto. He runs the company from a 11,000-square-foot pilot facility in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Neil Cohen
Neil Cohen is a Manhattan-trained investment banker who co-founded American Rock Salt Company, the largest-producing salt mine in the United States, after the historic Retsof mine collapsed and flooded in the 1990s. As Founder, Co-CEO and Vice Chairman, he helped assemble the financing for the first successful new U.S. salt mine in over four decades, in Mount Morris, New York. In parallel he runs Emerald Development Managers LP, an early-stage venture capital firm he founded in 1994, backing science-heavy startups in diagnostics, digital pathology, nanotechnology and fuel cells. His career spans the deeply physical (20,000 tons of rock salt a day, mined 1,200 feet underground) and the deeply speculative (frontier-tech venture bets).
HyperSciences, Inc.
HyperSciences is a Spokane, Washington deep-tech company that commercializes the ram accelerator - an in-tube hypersonic engine licensed from the University of Washington - to fire projectiles through rock at up to nine times the speed of sound. Its platform technology, the HyperCore, powers products for tunneling and mining (HyperDrill, Hyperbreaker), geothermal and energy drilling, and aerospace launch (HyperLaunch). The pitch: break rock and reach orbit faster and cheaper by replacing slow mechanical drill bits and first-stage rockets with repeatable hypervelocity impact.
Mark Russell
Mark Russell is the founder and CEO of HyperSciences, a Spokane, Washington company turning a piece of aerospace exotica - the ram accelerator - into a tool that drills through rock up to ten times faster than a conventional rig. A former Blue Origin lead engineer on the crew capsule and a self-described third-generation miner, Russell fires projectiles at hypersonic speed every few seconds to crack rock for geothermal energy, mining and tunneling, and to lob payloads toward space through his sister venture Pipeline2Space. He raised roughly $9.6 million from thousands of small investors and won early backing from NASA and Shell.
Terra AI
Terra AI is a Palo Alto geoscience company building generative AI that turns the messy, expensive guesswork of subsurface exploration into fast, probabilistic 3D models of what lies underground. By fusing geophysics, geochemistry, and drilling data, its platform generates millions of geological scenarios in minutes, helping mining and energy teams decide where to drill, how many wells they need, and whether a project is worth the capital - shrinking exploration timelines and pointing capital at the critical minerals the clean-energy transition depends on.
Lilac Solutions
Lilac Solutions is an Oakland-based cleantech company commercializing a patented ion-exchange technology that pulls lithium directly out of brine - using ceramic beads instead of evaporation ponds. The process is faster, uses up to 90% less freshwater, and is designed to unlock low-grade brine resources around the world to feed the electric-vehicle battery supply chain.
Dan Wright
Dan Wright is the Co-Founder and CEO of Armada, a San Francisco-based edge computing company building ruggedized, modular AI data centers deployable anywhere in the world - from oil rigs to military forward operating bases. Before Armada, he led DataRobot as CEO during its hypergrowth phase (peak valuation $6.3B) and was COO and General Counsel at AppDynamics through its landmark $3.7B acquisition by Cisco. A lawyer-turned-operator, Wright co-founded Armada in December 2022 alongside Jon Runyan, raised a $230M Series B at a $2B valuation in May 2026, and has deployed edge AI infrastructure across 43 countries for customers including the U.S. Navy and Aker BP.
Raef Sully
Raef Sully is the CEO of Lilac Solutions, an Oakland-based company pioneering direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology using ceramic ion exchange beads. A structural engineer turned management consultant turned industrial executive, Sully brings 30+ years spanning tall buildings, the Australian Army Reserve, Bain & Company, and a decade running Nutrien's $10 billion nitrogen and phosphate division. He joined Lilac as COO in mid-2023 and ascended to CEO in February 2024 - the same month the company closed a $145 million Series C. Under his leadership, Lilac has achieved 87% lithium recovery at the Great Salt Lake, unveiled Gen 5 technology with 20x higher production rates, and signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement with Traxys North America targeting 50,000 tonnes of lithium product.
River
River is a San Francisco-based, bitcoin-only financial services company offering brokerage, custody, mining, and Lightning Network infrastructure. Founded in 2019 by Alex Leishman and Andrew Benson, River serves individuals and businesses who want to buy, hold, earn yield on, and transact with bitcoin from a US-regulated, transparent, full-reserve institution.
KoBold Metals
KoBold Metals is a Berkeley-based mineral exploration company that uses artificial intelligence, data science, and geophysics to find the copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel deposits the energy transition will require. Founded in 2018, it has raised roughly $1 billion from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and is developing the Mingomba copper project in Zambia, called the country's largest copper discovery in a century.
Mariana Minerals
Mariana Minerals is a software-first, vertically integrated critical minerals company building MarianaOS, an AI platform that turns mineral discovery, extraction and refining into a live, data-driven operation. The company is restarting and building lithium, copper and nickel projects across the U.S., starting with Copper One in Utah - billed as the world's first autonomy-first copper mine.
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.
John Mern
John Mern is the Co-Founder and CEO of Terra AI, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup using generative AI and probabilistic modeling to transform how humans find and develop critical minerals and energy resources underground. A Stanford PhD in aerospace engineering and alumnus of Boeing Phantom Works and KoBold Metals, Mern built Terra AI's platform to cut mine development timelines in half - running geophysical simulations 125,000x faster than traditional methods, achieving 40% reductions in drilling costs, and helping partners unlock over $100 million in investments. His work sits at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning, geoscience, and the urgent global race to secure the copper, lithium, and cobalt the energy transition demands.