Earth AI, a predictive explorer for clean energy metals using artificial intelligence (AI), has announced $20M in Series B funding.
The oversubscribed round was led by Tamarack Global and Cantos Ventures. Participating investors include Overmatch, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital, and significant support from existing investors including Y Combinator and Scrum Ventures. New funding will drive AI and drilling technology development and accelerate project value discovery. The company plans to increase the project pipeline to over 50 sites and increase drilling capacity to 100,000 meters at an industry beating ~$100/meter cost.
Founded in 2017, Earth AI is disrupting the mining industry through its AI-powered Mineral Targeting Platform (MTP) that is capable of rapidly identifying mineral resources in previously untapped areas at a fraction of the cost. Combined with proprietary mobile low disturbance, drilling technology (MLD), the company's approach has achieved an industry-leading discovery success rate of 75% (compared to an estimated industry average of 0.5%1), while reducing exploration costs by up to 80%.
Despite the tremendous global need for mineral resources for everything from the energy transition to day-to-day life, new mineral deposit discoveries are notorious for being expensive and time consuming," said Roman Teslyuk, founder and CEO of Earth AI. "Earth AI is changing this paradigm using its proprietary AI and drilling technology that has already made verified discoveries in greenfield regions. This new round of funding will be critical to expanding our operations and establishing a pipeline of attractive new mining projects for the industry."
Earth AI's model is focused on identifying mineral deposits using AI, validating them through drilling and then selling the multi-billion-dollar mining rights to large cap mining companies. The company's predictive technology has been extensively trained using continental scale data sets that combine and contextualize 400 million pieces of disparate information along with satellite remote sensing to identify greenfield prospects–a key differentiator to other exploration technologies that focus on identifying resources near existing mines. This ability makes Earth AI an integral partner for the mining industry as it seeks to meet the exponential growth in demand for critical minerals resulting from the global energy transition.
"We are always attracted to companies operating in large addressable markets like critical minerals that have found unique ways to create superior cost structures and defensibility in their approach. Earth AI fits squarely within this target and has already proven industry leading success rates using their AI engine, the Mineral Targeting Platform, which we believe to be the best trained model amongst any other players in the space. We are very excited to lead this round and believe the future is very bright for this incredible company," said Jamie Lee, managing partner at Tamarack Global
Global demand for critical minerals is expected to reach $10tn by 2050 and current production will need to increase ~30x to meet that threshold. Many mining companies are focused on extraction, while discovery and exploration is outsourced to a fragmented market of micro-cap companies whose efficiency has declined by ~70% over the last decade. Leveraging the latest technology, Earth AI is poised to become the origination engine of the mining industry, providing organic growth of new mining assets to an industry that desperately needs it to meet the coming tidal wave of demand.