Former BHP and Epiroc business leader Sarah Hoffman will take over as CEO of Geopyora in early October at what chair Rob Stephens has called a “key inflexion point” for the Finnish technology firm.
Hoffman, who spent more than 17 years at BHP, Epiroc and its rival Sandvik, succeeds Geopyora founder Marcos de Paiva Bueno as CEO. The move follows Geopyora’s seed funding round with Canada’s Chrysalix Venture Capital earlier this year.
“We are seeing significant growth in customer traction,” said Stephens, a long-time entrepreneur and consultant in the mining and metals tech space. A PhD in nano materials production led him into pyrometallurgy and extractive metallurgy.
“With our customers and partners we are disrupting the status quo in comminution testing and the use of the data by exploration and mining companies to make more time and materially improved decision making along their orebody lifecycles.”
Seven-year-old Geopyora cites a long list of heavyweight miners on its customer list.
de Paiva Bueno, who continues as the company’s chief technology officer, said Hoffman’s appointment “gives us the leadership capacity to put real force” behind its global scaling efforts. He would be able to “focus even more deeply on advancing the technology and its applications”.
“We started Geopyora because mining measures grade with thousands of assays and ore hardness with only a handful of tests,” de Paiva Bueno said.
“We have spent years proving that hardness can be measured at assay scale, using the same samples and fitting into the same laboratory workflow.”
Geopyora says it has commercialised an approach to orebody characterisation that uses samples in existing geological and assay workflows to generate spatially dense hardness and breakage data.
“Today the mining industry performs roughly one comminution test for every 10,000 grade assays,” it says.
“Geopyora closes that gap. Its ambition is to make ore hardness information as routine and actionable as grade data, helping mining companies better understand and manage ore variability across exploration, mine planning and processing and forecast throughput and operating costs across the life of mine through improved timely decision making with greater confidence and accuracy.”
Oulu-based Geopyora’s patented breakage test and AI-driven comminution models are being used by mineral testing and analysis laboratories as well as miners. “Geopyora allows more samples to be tested at a low cost to better understand variability and minimise risks,” one lab owner said.
Hoffman started a Netherlands-based advisory firm after spending more than six years at Epiroc, finishing as vice president global strategy, mergers and acquisitions. Epiroc, a large Swedish mining equipment manufacturer, has been among the busiest international acquirers of mining tech firms in the past decade.
“What attracted me to Geopyora is the opportunity to change something very fundamental in an industry I have spent most of my career working in,” she said.
“The company is tackling one of those mining problems that has been sitting in plain sight for years. Ore hardness has an enormous effect on performance yet we still know far less about it than we should. This team has found a practical way to change that.
“I am excited not only by the technology but by the deeply experienced and diverse team behind it, people with real-world mining experience who are committed to making this capability more accessible, more useful and much more widely understood across the industry.”
