Mining Imaging Company Ideon Technologies Raises $16 Million

By Noah Long ● Sep 21, 2022
  • Ideon Technologies recently announced it raised $16 million in funding. These are the details.

Ideon Technologies recently announced it raised $16 million in funding. 

Funding amount: $16 million

Funding round: Series A

Investors: Led by Playground Global

Funding purpose: The investment will expand Ideon’s production capacity and accelerate the commercialization of its Discovery Platform, which is helping to transform the critical minerals supply chain feeding the clean energy transition.

The investment will enable Ideon to scale demand for muon tomography solution while developing other novel advanced detector technologies (including drone-based gravimetry and magnetometry solutions) and data integration methodologies (including artificial intelligence and joint inversions) in order to continually improve the subsurface imaging performance of the Discovery Platform. And Ideon is also expanding its team in the Vancouver area, hiring across their engineering and software development, go-to-market, and operational teams.

What Ideon does: Ideon utilizes the natural energy generated by supernova explosions in space – in the form of subatomic particles called cosmic-ray muons – to provide x-ray-like visibility up to 1 km (0.6 miles) beneath the Earth’s surface. And the Discovery Platform integrates proprietary muon detectors, imaging systems, inversion technologies, and artificial intelligence to deliver exceptional locational accuracy with higher spatial resolution than any other existing technique. Ideon is known for mapping the intensity of muons underground and constructs detailed 3D density profiles of underground anomalies such as mineral and metal deposits, air voids, caves, and other structures. This helps geologists identify mineral and metal deposits with precision and confidence, reducing risk and cost, saving time, and minimizing the environmental impact of exploration.

KEY QUOTES:

“Our company mission is to help accelerate the world’s transition to low-impact mining, which we’re achieving by delivering an unprecedented level of geological certainty in an exploration market that has traditionally been dominated by uncertainty. Today, billion-dollar decisions are being made with just 1 percent of 1 percent of knowledge of the ore body. Our solution gives clients the confidence to identify new discoveries, map and characterize ore bodies in-mine to accelerate resource-to-reserve conversion, and to target high-recovery/low-waste deposits to deliver critical minerals faster, more reliably, and more sustainably than ever before.”

“Just as the world is at a key inflection point in the shift to clean energy, Ideon is at a key inflection point in our ability to support demand from the global mining industry, which plays a central role in fueling the clean technology supply chain. We believe the work we’re doing is important because there really is no clean energy without mining. This investment – with Playground Global’s partnership – will allow us to deliver more value, more quickly, to the areas of the mining industry that need our solution the most.”

— Gary Agnew, Co-Founder and CEO at Ideon

“To build a reliable, sustainable, secure critical mineral supply chain, there must be a radical new approach to discovering and mining critical metals and minerals. Ideon has developed a major technological breakthrough that is being used by the world’s largest mining companies, today. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with a team whose mission is aligned with ours and whose technology is already speeding the transition to a cleaner world.”

— Bruce Leak, General Partner at Playground Global