The past year has seen Vancouver-based Ideon open up promising growth paths in a mining sub-surface imaging and information technology market likely to be worth billions of dollars in the very near future.
New technologies are already starting to transform the space, which will be impacted by massive brownfield investment and large-scale underground mines over the next two decades. Perhaps none will be more important than muon tomography. Ideon’s CEO, Gary Agnew described 2024 as “a wild ride of proving that muon tomography isn’t just a cool scientific concept but a game-changing approach to subsurface intelligence”. That meant successful demonstrations – lots of them – all over the world.
It means the scaling phase of Ideon’s five-year commercialisation journey is building strong momentum amid some helpful tailwinds. Multiple muon use-case demonstrations in 2024 involved a mix of heavyweight miners.
The company went through 60 employees in December. It’s just been recognised as Best Scale-up in InvestMETS.com’s annual Global Mining Technology Awards. At the start of 2025 it announced the formation of the “Ideon Council of Subsurface Experts”, featuring current and former BHP and Rio Tinto mining technical leaders and other, internationally-renowned earth scientists, to help guide its product development. This builds on earlier expansion of its in-house advisory capacity and its market focus, away from just greenfield exploration, which has been more than validated.
“There are so many mining tech companies that have got the latest widget and are going to change the world,” Agnew told InvestMETS.com. “We’re trying to do it in a very informed, co-operative way with the industry. We don’t want to be the kids that build cool stuff and nobody wants to buy it.
“We have started with a problem – a problem the industry is struggling with – and then reverse engineered with a combination of technologies a solution to that problem. Muon tomography is an important undergirding for all of that because it’s a breakthrough data set that gives us high resolution data that we can dial down to sub-metre scale or dial up to 20m scale. No other geophysics offers that. And because we have that we can solve problems at every stage of the value chain.”
A spin-off from Canada’s national TRUMF particle physics lab, Ideon is using energy from supernova explosions to survey up to 1km or more beneath the Earth’s surface. It describes itself as a “world pioneer in cosmic-ray muon tomography”. Its “subsurface intelligence platform” combines proprietary detectors, imaging systems, inversion technologies and artificial intelligence to convert muon data into high-density 3D images.
“Our suite of proprietary data-generation hardware, software, AI-powered services and multi-physics fusion algorithms unlock the exponential power of integrated spatial data in the subsurface,” Ideon says in its Global Mining Technology Awards submission.
“Because they don’t know what is in the subsurface mining companies resort to using painstakingly slow methods of extracting and analysing detailed data from thousands of drill holes, interpolating what may exist between those geological biopsies. Even with all those holes they still don’t know for sure. They base billion-dollar investment and operational decisions on guesses of what might be there.
“This uncertainty leads to underperformance across the mining life cycle.
“With no way to address it, mining companies accept great business risk to get critical metals to market quickly. When their estimates are wrong, it creates operational, financial and corporate impacts that are felt for decades. Geological uncertainty impedes growth, drives costs, and slows time to market. By closing the gap on that uncertainty, reducing it dramatically and providing the tools to quantify what’s left, Ideon gives mining companies greater confidence to move earlier, faster and with less downstream risk.”
Ideon is currently strategically focused on what it calls four high-value use cases.
It has demonstrated the technology in, and is working with majors on, brownfield exploration, resource definition and extension, geotechnical assessment and remote tracking of block and sub-level underground caves. The latter provides a particularly good case study of the increasing receptiveness of the market to certain new technologies and of the effectiveness of Ideon’s approach.
“We see block caving again becoming a go-to method, especially when the ask of mining companies is to mine low-grade copper efficiently from a cost perspective and from an ESG perspective,” Agnew said.
“With block caving you remove one-10th of the earth and need one-10th of the energy [versus] traditional openpit mining techniques. Once you put the capital in up front you get a very efficient mining process. So we can see mining companies shifting because in almost any energy transition scenario copper is a huge demand. The AI boom that’s coming on top of it is just accentuating that. And ultimately copper more and more is found in low-grade, porphyry-style deposits. There’s probably about 25 [block cave] sites globally; there is another 25 in planning and our customers are talking about more block caving being an overall trend for the industry.”
With caves established, drilling, smart markers, beacons and seismic are among the essential tools providing feedback on the operational parameters defining returns on multi-billion-dollar investments.
“All the approaches are giving you point data and then the mining company is left to model, with a lot of underlying assumptions, how the cave is going to evolve based on that point data,” Agnew said.
“What’s different about muon tomography is we map the whole cave back, or 95% of the cave back, and we’re able to do that to very high resolution. We’re able to provide the customer with what we call 4D imaging – so 3D plus time – and we’re able to provide that imaging on an update frequency that matches the operating cadence of the mine.
“So instead of 30-day cadence we’re giving them very dynamic, full-picture information.
“We hear numbers like there can be anywhere from a 15-to-30% swing in terms of what they thought they were going to pull out of the cave versus what actually comes out. Some of these caves are $10 billion upfront capital. If you’ve got a 10% swing that’s a lot of lot of money. If you’ve got a 20-or-30% swing that is like make or break in some instances. To be able to give the customer dynamic information so they know ahead of time how the cave is propagating, or as it’s happening, it allows them to change their draw strategy, for example.
“Changing the draw strategy can force the cave to correct itself, whereas you might have a situation where the cave can be migrating away from the underground infrastructure they have spent billions of dollars investing in and of course if that’s migrating away you’re losing ore.”
Agnew indicated Ideon – and certainly the broader sector – was chipping the top off the proverbial iceberg of sub-surface data modelling and fusion. A lot of work remains to be done on merging high-value data and in other areas such as user interface design and, of course, AI-driven analytics.
“We provide the ability to integrate other data,” Agnew said. “Other people can do that. But muon tomography actually gives you a very powerful key to be able to unlock value in other data.
“One of the things we think is a real differentiator is uncertainty quantification.
“Look at the oil and gas business pre the late 90s. It kind of worked like the mining business does today. The geologists [and] geophysicists had lots of good gut instinct. They worked on similar previous projects so they’ve got a bias. All that stuff. And oil and gas went through a significant transformation and really a couple of things played out in that transformation.
“Seismic went from being a rudimentary tool to 4D seismic, which was very advanced, and really that became the technology that unlocked a lot of the transformation. But the second thing that happened was they shifted to more probabilistic decision making: stochastic decision making.
“In mining we tend to give one answer. But the truth is there isn’t one answer, there’s multiple answers with a range of probability. We can see the opportunity to really quantify a customer’s uncertainty level based on all the data they already have, be able to put numbers on it in a 3D volume and then use our Reveal platform to play with options. If I drilled another hole where would I best position that hole to statistically reduce my uncertainty?
“We think this is a real game-changing capability.”
