Toronto-listed mining AI minnow, Minerva Intelligence, has squared away a C$4.5 million equity financing to speed commercialisation of its geology and “climate risk” products.
The company, which started trading on the TSX Venture exchange in mid-2019, issued nearly 30 million new shares at C15c (with attached half warrants exercisable at 25c within two years) to raise $4.49m before costs.
The stock traded to its highest level around 40c earlier this year and was above 20c this month, capitalising the company at circa-C$14.75m.
Minerva CEO Scott Tillman has described the company as a “knowledge engineering company” that takes esoteric human understanding – including geological know-how – and embeds it in machines.
“We get computers to think and reason like a human would, but without the bias or data limitations that a human would bring to the table,” he has said.
“Minerva started out by building applications in the fields of mining and exploration and natural hazards because while these domains have a lot of data accumulated by humans over decades and centuries, this knowledge has been captured in a form that computers can’t understand. Using our technology, we can transform that collected knowledge into a form that computers can reason with.”
Vancouver-based Minerva says a 5% success rate in brownfield mineral exploration and 0.5% success rate in greenfield exploration compares with 35% in oil and gas exploration where greater use is made of computer modelling. “Advances in data collection and storage technologies have vastly increased the amount of data available to a geologist, however, it has led to databases that are far too vast and complex for geologists to effectively or efficiently evaluate. We believe the use of AI can revolutionise how companies search for mineral deposits.”
Tillman said this week Minerva’s GAIA Climate Risk AI mapping and management system could help position the company as a leader in the expanding risk management field.
And while Minerva’s current products focused on the search for critical metals and the assessment of physical climate risk, the technology was expected to find increasing applications in “diverse industries and domains”.
