Terra AI, the artificial intelligence platform helping solve subsurface uncertainty for mineral and energy development, has announced a $20 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, with a strategic investment from BHP Ventures. The capital will accelerate deployment of Terra AI’s generative geological modeling platform across mining, enhanced geothermal, and carbon storage applications. The company is also backed by Rio Tinto and other strategic investors.
Terra AI’s patented platform integrates nearly every type of exploration data — including geophysics, geochemistry, and drilling data — to generate millions of probabilistic geological models in minutes, enabling project teams to evaluate a comprehensive range of potential subsurface scenarios and make risk-quantified decisions earlier than previously possible. The platform’s geology reasoning agent works with operators to create precise, optimized exploration plans, helping teams develop critical assets with minimal time, cost, and environmental disruption. New discoveries typically require an average of 17 years to advance from exploration to production, and Terra AI said its technology is designed to dramatically compress that timeline and the capital required to define deposits and reservoirs. The same platform is also being applied to carbon storage sites, where understanding subsurface uncertainty is equally critical to selecting safe, permanent storage locations.
Over the past year, Terra AI has demonstrated modeling capabilities on mining and reservoir projects spanning early exploration through production, building commercial momentum across copper, gold, rare earth element, and reservoir projects with the world’s leading resource companies. The fresh capital will support scaling the company’s generative modeling engine, accelerating enterprise-grade deployments, and advancing the subsurface inference technology the industry needs to meet accelerating global demand for critical minerals.
KEY QUOTES:
“Explorers today face increasing complexities like rising project uncertainty and immense pressure to bring new resources online faster. This investment enables us to move to the next phase of Terra AI’s growth by scaling our generative modeling engine, accelerating enterprise-grade deployments, and advancing the subsurface inference technology the industry needs to meet critical mineral demand.”
John Mern, Chief Executive Officer, Terra AI
“The world’s ability to discover and develop critical resources is fundamentally constrained by outdated, fragmented exploration. Terra AI is defining a new, AI-native exploration approach with their continuously improving 3D Earth model. We believe their technology will dramatically accelerate the development of the critical minerals the world needs, and we’re excited to help them scale this vision globally.”
Rajesh Swaminathan, Partner, Khosla Ventures
