Talk in Perth this week at a Western Australian Mining Club luncheon may have tended to reinforce the belief that mining and Silicon Valley have little in common but, suffice to say, the view from San Francisco’s Bay Area is a little different.
A Perth mining club gathering that featured – unusually – a bunch of tech firms trying to woo mining and metals companies heard the industry remains a tough rock to crack. As far as adopting new tech goes, mining was generally number one at being the “second mouse to the cheese”, industry veteran and luncheon panel member Grant Wellwood said. This and the industry’s “immune system”, which tended to reject most foreign (new tech included) intrusions, made it hard for fast-moving tech companies to get the kind of purchase they expected within reasonable timeframes.
Many simply turned to more appealing markets. But some, said another panellist, Marina Baslina, a London-based adviser to international mining tech firms, would buy their own “sandbox” to put new technologies through their paces. Companies already doing this include the likes of San Francisco-based Mariana Minerals and Berkley-headquartered KoBold Metals. They’ve taken fat cheques from Silicon Valley investors and that pit seems bottomless by mining-sector standards if these types of companies can get the results they’re promising.
Baslina said this type of vertical integration could increase “as we get more and more capital from Silicon Valley-type investors”.
One person who could have made a meaningful contribution to the Perth discussion is Johann Dias, a self-described second-generation miner (and former particle physicist) who founded San Francisco mining robotics startup, URSA Mining, in 2024. Speaking on a recent episode of the Atomic Build Behind the Code podcast, Dias said better connection between Silicon Valley and mining ultimately had to come from “first principles thinking”.
“Mines really only care about moving dirt and maintaining the status quo,” he said, echoing the talk in Perth.
“If you can maintain that status quo and do it cheaper it immediately solves for one of their stakeholders’ bottom lines, which is increased profitability in the operation.”
In the same vein, pressure on miners to sidestep skill shortages, improve safety and ultimately to significant streamline operations would necessarily bring the tech, tech finance and mining worlds closer.
“Silicon Valley deeply understands the rate at which technology can improve the world around us, can streamline things, and make them more efficient; make them better,” Dias said.
“Autonomy is progressing at an unprecedented rate and that rate is only going to continue to compound to the point where, at least I believe, generalised robotics as a field is going to be solved for and commoditised.
“That’s what I think the mining industry misses that Silicon Valley understands.
“But what Silicon Valley doesn’t understand about mining … is that mines are not nearly as antiquated as people think. I believe the first real commercial use case of offroad autonomy was at a mine owned by Rio Tinto in Australia back in 2008 when they first piloted it.
“The industry itself, holistically, has been very embracing of autonomy. So miners are [not] just a bunch of luddites. They’re acutely aware of the value [automation] can bring to the industry.
“But there’s a very high barrier of trust that you need to be able to communicate through.
“It’s not a hurdle that you jump over. It’s something you actually have to pass through.
“And I think Silicon Valley doesn’t really understand that culture.”
Biotech firm on the right path
Manchester-based LanthaGen Bio is looking for more non-dilutive funding to speed its development of metal-targeting “biomagnets” and as it pursues seed equity funding.
The firm will vie for £100,000 during next month’s University of Manchester Innovation Festival after being shortlisted for Unit M’s Coller Foundation AI Competition. It has secured more than £2.1 million all up in competitions and grants.
The biotech firm was only formed in August last year by University of Manchester PhDs Dan Healy, Sahara Bhanot and Ellie Goulding.
“We’re applying our bespoke frontier AI model to molecular design, engineering proteins to selectively recover critical minerals from e-waste,” they said this week. “Our approach brings together machine learning, molecular simulation and experimental validation to turn advances in AI into real-world solutions for critical mineral supply.”
Having picked up £75,000 in a University of Manchester Ideas with Impact competition last year, coming in second, LanthaGen hit the jackpot at German government agency Bundesagentur fur Sprunginnovationen’s (SPRIND) Tech Metal Transformation Challenge when it won £1.12 million in December. It says up to a further £5 million of stage-gated investments are potentially on the table in the SPRIND program.
LanthaGen Bio says its technology uses de novo proteins to selectively bind metals and effectively discard unwanted impurities in solution. “The company’s key USP is the ability to separate the precious metals in one vessel, a process that is currently done using solvent extraction and takes at least 15 steps,” it says. It initially focused on rare earths – primarily lanthanides with atomic numbers 57-71, including cerium and neodymium – but realised with powerful computational modelling it could produce biomagnets for other metals. Now it wants to move from laboratory validation to testing in “relevant environments in coming months”, having conducted market evaluations on trips to Canada, the US and Australia.
“The biggest opportunities lie in helping industry recover critical and precious metals from secondary sources more efficiently, especially as supply chain resilience and domestic access to strategic materials become more important,” CEO Sahara Bhanot says.
“There is also significant growth potential in expanding the biomagnets platform across multiple metals and application environments, opening up new routes to recovery from low-grade or complex waste streams.”
Returning serve
Sandvik CEO Stefan Widing says it was great to see “real out-of-the-box thinking” on a visit to California-based Mariana Minerals’ Copper One openpit mine in Utah. He’d hosted Mariana founder Turner Caldwell in Tampere, Finland, in early September at Sandvik’s Future of Mining event. Now it was Caldwell’s turn to show Widing and Sandvik head of mining in the US, Phil Kroczek, around his Utah sandpit.
“Mariana has a software-first approach to mining and their vision of the mine of the future is more or less identical to ours,” Widing said after the visit.
“The difference is that as a mine operator with a software-first approach they have full control over both the technology stack and the operations and thus can accelerate the progress towards that vision.
“Add a little Silicon Valley culture and money to the mix and things move fast.”
Mariana is bringing plenty of Silicon Valley chutzpah and a big chunk of Sand Hill Road change (Khosla Ventures led a recent US$310 million equity raise) to mining. It has one of Sandvik’s automated surface drills at Copper One.
Widing said his detour to Utah on his way back to Sweden from a trip to Chicago was “well worth it”.
“It was great to see a new type of mining company take shape and to meet and engage with the team behind it,” he said.
About Picks, Shovels & Robots: “When everybody is digging for gold it’s good to be in the pick and shovel business”. In the 1800s thousands rushed to California – and other parts of the world – to find gold. Most miners went broke or didn’t survive. Merchants who sold shovels, pans, denim pants and staples made a fortune. Some of the technology has changed but suppliers of essential prospecting and mining tools and services have never been more in vogue.
