Earth AI, a predictive explorer for clean energy metals using artificial intelligence (AI), announced $20 million in Series B funding. Tamarack Global and Cantos Ventures led this oversubscribed round. Participating investors include Overmatch, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital, and significant support from existing investors, including Y Combinator and Scrum Ventures. The 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 about $100/meter cost.
Launched in 2017, Earth AI is disrupting the mining industry through its AI-powered Mineral Targeting Platform (MTP), capable of rapidly identifying mineral resources in previously untapped areas at a fraction of the cost. And 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%.
Earth AI’s model focuses 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 major 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 seeking to meet the exponential growth in demand for critical minerals resulting from the global energy transition.
Global demand for critical minerals is expected to reach $10 trillion by 2050 and current production will need to increase about 30x to meet that threshold. And 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. Utilizing 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.
So far, Earth AI has announced the following discoveries during the fourth quarter of 2024:
— Discovery of one of the largest greenfield palladium mineral systems in Australia, in partnership with Legacy Minerals (Nov, 2024)
— Discovery of a new gold system in Willow Glen, New South Wales, Australia (Dec, 2024)
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
– Roman Teslyuk, founder and CEO of Earth AI
“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.”
– Jamie Lee, managing partner at Tamarack Global
