Munich-based mining tech start-up Hades Mining has wrapped up a €15 million (crica-US$18 million) seed funding round, reportedly at a €67.5 million (US$80 million) valuation, to advance development of an industrial laser drill and move mining in a different direction.
The company, which completed a €5.5 million pre-seed round last year, has again been backed by Berlin VCs Project A and Visionaries Tomorrow. The seed round was co-led by Munich VC HV Capital and San Francisco-based Headline.
Headline general partner Christian Miele said Hades, formed last year, was the “kind of deeply technical, industrial company Europe needs right now, built for sovereignty, resilience and scale”.
Visionaries said the speed of the follow-up funding reflected “significant technical breakthroughs” in Hades’ lab-scale work, as well as the “growing urgency around European energy and critical minerals sovereignty”.
“Hades is building a vertically integrated resource extraction company, with proprietary high-power laser drilling technology at its core,” Visionaries said. “Designed from first principles for deep and hard rock environments, the system fundamentally changes the cost, speed and impact profile of drilling – unlocking geothermal and in-situ mineral projects that were previously uneconomic in Europe.
“This new capital will fast-track the path toward industrial scale, expand the team in Munich and advance a pipeline of first extraction projects across Europe.”
Hades CEO and co-founder Dr Max Werner said the company would ramp up hiring activity. It had 11 employees at the end of 2025 and this could grow to 36 by the end of 2026.
He said Hades had been able to successfully demonstrate the rock destruction capabilities of its laser and the ability of its purging system to clear borehole lava. It had also delivered 200 kilowatts of energy working with an unnamed European partner company.
“We are building the world’s first tech-enabled extraction company, beginning with a laser drilling system that fundamentally shifts the economics of ISR mining and geothermal energy,” Werner said.
“Drilling is the single largest cost driver in these industries. When drilling becomes cheaper, faster and cleaner, entire project categories become viable for the first time.”
Werner said in an interview late last year Hades zeroed in on laser technology after a two-year review of available rock destruction approaches.
“Laser has by far the greatest ability to destroy rock and because of this we think that speed will translate ultimately into cost reduction and I think the industry deeply and dramatically needs cost reduction in drilling,” he said.
“Laser can be 80-to-100-times faster than conventional drilling methods.
“Our laser drill goes through hard rock at 45-50m per hour … So far we haven’t done it at scale.
“We hope to be having an impact on the European mining industry in the next few years for sure.
“It’s a very ambitious project. Designing this new drill is an enormous engineering challenge. From the complexity level I think it is one or two levels below a rocket but still very complex. That’s mainly because the environment this technology needs to work in is insanely hostile. It is not an environment in which you want to have any sensitive technology. So that makes this an enormous engineering challenge.
“We do see it as a solvable challenge.”
Werner said Hades didn’t want to be a drilling contractor or a drill vendor.
“We also do want to do mining,” he said.
“The technology gives us a claim to have a larger business model, or to try to have bigger impact. To do that we pretty much want to own the entire value chain in mining and ultimately own assets and extract resources. Our end product is ultimately not the drill. The end product is going to be tonnes of critical minerals that we have taken out of the earth and also geothermal energy.
“The landscape looks very attractive to us at the moment.
“Europe produces less than 3% of the critical minerals it consumes. That puts us at the very bottom of the global list.
“We kind of need to make mining sexy again in Europe … Without our own supply chains for energy and defence we are not a society. This geopolitical context is of the most importance.”
Beyond Europe’s mining needs Hades has its sights on off-planet resource drilling and extraction where it thinks lasers are literally the future.
Werner’s timeline for an off-world enterprise? “I would say the next 10-to-20 years.”
