Mineral discoveries in Australia

Last summer, mining startup KoBold announced it had discovered one of the largest copper deposits in over a decade in Zambia. Now, another startup, Earth AI, revealed to TechCrunch that it has found promising deposits of critical minerals in parts of Australia that had been overlooked for decades. While it is still unclear if these deposits are as large as KoBold's, the news suggests that future supplies of critical minerals may come from a combination of field data analyzed by artificial intelligence.

Roman Teslyuk, founder and CEO of Earth AI, stated that the real frontier in mining is not so much geographical as it is technological. Earth AI has identified deposits of copper, cobalt, and gold in the Northern Territory and deposits of silver, molybdenum, and tin at another site in New South Wales, 310 miles (500 kilometers) northwest of Sydney. These discoveries occurred in two regions of Australia that had previously been ignored.

Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk's studies, a native of Ukraine pursuing a doctorate at the University of Sydney. There, he learned that the government owns the rights to mineral deposits and leases them for six-year terms. Since the 1970s, exploration companies are required to submit their data to a national archive. Teslyuk noted that, for some reason, no one is using them. He thought that if he could build an algorithm to absorb all that knowledge and learn from the successes and failures of millions of geologists, he could make better predictions about where to find minerals in the future.

Initially, Teslyuk started Earth AI as a software company focused on predicting potential deposits, then reaching out to customers who might be interested in further exploring the sites. However, customers were hesitant to invest, partly because they did not want to bet millions on the predictions of an unproven technology. Teslyuk stated that mining is a very conservative industry, and anything outside the approved dogma is considered heresy.

To prove that the identified sites were as promising as suggested by the software, Earth AI decided to develop its own drilling equipment. The company was accepted into Y Combinator's spring 2019 cohort and spent the following years refining its hardware and software. In January, Earth AI raised $20 million in a Series B funding round.

Although the company uses AI to search for minerals like KoBold, Teslyuk claims it takes a different approach. Earth AI's algorithms are trained to quickly and efficiently scan wide areas to find deposits that might otherwise have been overlooked. Teslyuk emphasized that the way metals were explored in the past took a very long time, often decades to find something. With the modern pace of the world, one cannot wait that long.