mining
(9)Ryan Dunlop and the Work Beneath the Worksite
A Saskatchewan civil superintendent's career is measured in what gets built, what stays safe and what quietly works beneath the surface.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.