Senior mining leaders Mark Cutifani, Nev Power and Nick Popovic have joined UK mining technology company IntelliSense.io’s newly formed strategic advisory board after investing in the firm alongside Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Mitsubishi Corporation and Hitachi Construction Machinery.
SEP, which says it typically invests £5-to-25 million in tech scale-ups, believes IntelliSense.io has built market acceptance of its “differentiated” industrial AI platform, said to be used by at least “24 tier-one operations across eight countries and commodities”.
SEP managing partner Keith Davidson said IntelliSense.io founder Sam Bose and the 13-year-old Cambridge firm’s management team had “built a strong foundation and we look forward to working closely with them to support international expansion, continued commercial development and the company’s long-term ambitions”.
Intellisense.io says process-level applications of its software across flotation, grinding, thickening and leaching have helped users increase throughput and recovery rates and lower reagent use.
“Mineral processing is vital to the global economy but it remains among the most complex industrial environments in which to deploy AI at scale,” SEP principal Daniel Muranda said.
“IntelliSense.io has built a differentiated platform that combines deep process expertise with technology that can autonomously improve operating decisions in real time. Its strong, blue-chip customer base and expanding product footprint give us confidence in the company’s long-term potential.”
Former Anglo American CEO Cutifani, ex-Fortescue and Thiess boss Power and Popovic, previously a Glencore copper and zinc marketing executive and chair of Kazzinc, have made undisclosed investments in IntelliSense.io.
Cleve Lightfoot, a former head of innovation at BHP, joined IntelliSense.io as its chief customer officer in 2024.
A 2020 funding round saw BASF Venture Capital, part of German chemical giant BASF, invest in IntelliSense.io and work with it to accelerate growth.
Hitachi Construction Machinery late last year disclosed a US$3 million investment in Canadian mining tech firm, Rithmik Solutions, with HCM mining business president Eiji Fukunishi describing the move as an “important step towards Hitachi Construction Machinery’s goal of building open digital platforms with various partners”.
“Combining Rithmik’s advanced, AI-powered data analysis technology with Hitachi Construction Machinery’s insight will help us provide more flexible solutions to our customers as well as contribute to increased productivity and reduced environmental impact at mining sites,” Fukunishi said.
HCM, Mitsubishi Corporation and SEP representatives are also part of IntelliSense.io’s advisory board.
“Mining sits at the foundation of every supply chain the world is racing to secure,” Bose said.
“Our scientific AI encodes the actual physics and chemistry governing a process not just patterns in data, so it can make consistent, explainable and real-time decisions for both people and machines. “This investment lets us take that capability to every major mining region in the world.”
IntelliSense.io maintains its proprietary Owned Inference architecture is a key differentiator and that the “the market is moving past the assumption that foundation models will absorb every vertical as horizontal models cannot embed the first-principles physical constraints and site-specific configurations that industrial processes demand”.
“Owned Inference delivers domain-specific models that start from the underlying science rather than statistical pattern-matching and calibrate to each site using only that site’s own data,” the company says.
“All data and learnings remain in the customer’s own stack not in a shared foundation model and the platform intelligently routes between frontier and open-weight models by workload, grounded in physics rather than opaque weights.”
