Chemshift Technologies, Supra Elemental Recovery, Foresight Spatial Labs, Material Difference, Voluna and Watergenics are the latest start-ups plucked from a sea of applicants by London-based Founders Factory and mining major Rio Tinto for new funding and commercialisation support.
Founders and Rio formed a mining tech accelerator venture in 2024 and have since backed two dozen firms. They say their global portfolio has raised about US$120 million of follow-on funding, with recently inducted Hades Mining of Germany, Norway-based Spoor AI, and US-headquartered Endolith and VyCarb raising circa-$50 million between them.
According to Founders and Rio, the increasing depth of talent and funding in the global mining-tech pool underscores its emergence as “one of the fastest growing sectors in venture”. They say the latest accelerator cohort has some of the strongest technical founders yet engaged in the program, drawn from leading institutions including Cambridge University, Stanford University, Harvard Business School, McGill University and the University of Calgary.
“This cohort reflects the quality of innovation emerging globally, and we’re excited about the potential to accelerate these solutions towards real-world deployment,” said Rio Tinto general manager innovation, Emily Hilton.
University of Texas spinout Supra Elemental Recovery raised $2 million of pre-seed funding earlier this year to advance development and commercialisation of 3D-printed supramolecular cartridges it says can be “tuned” to absorb specific elements. Co-founder and CEO Katie Durham said in an interview this week the proprietary polymer cartridges – pre-industrial scale – were being used to recover gallium, scandium and cobalt and “we’re working on developing cartridges for other critical minerals”.
Mine waste containing millions of tonnes of presently non-commercial metals is one target market of the Austin-based firm, which is building a 370-square-metre facility to expand testing of mine feedstocks and develop commercial flow sheets.
“One of the reasons it’s been very difficult to recycle [metals] is because it’s very difficult to separate out individual metals from each other, especially metals that are very similar to each other,” Durham said.
“If a current technology is just using electrostatics they’re going to struggle to separate out the elements that are more closely related on the periodic table from an electrostatic standpoint. So a lot of start-ups, including ours, are looking at different methods.
“Our technology combines supramolecular receptors that go beyond electrostatics … with material science innovations and engineering innovations.
“You can think of it like a baseball glove that captures the specific element that we’re targeting.
“We have eight scientists and the three inventors, so 11 chemists, and engineers, who are working on this every day.”
Voluna and its founders were recently recognised by the San Francisco-based Poets & Quants digital platform among its “Most Disruptive MBA Startups of 2025” for their new venture and autonomous airborne neutron technology (yes, that is a real combination) that they expect to deploy in the field in the next few months.
CEO Alexander Strange, an aerospace engineer, said he met one of his co-founders, Elias Fernandini, purely by chance at a Harvard Business School entrepreneurship class when he was pitching an idea for lunar helium-3 mining.
Fernandini, from a multi-generational Peruvian mining family, said he heard the pitch, didn’t know if he heard the bit about the Moon correctly, but was “super intrigued by it” anyway.
“I had a background in finance, always [being] indirectly involved in the mining industry … I said to him, why don’t we try to mine Earth first with this tech? Maybe there is something here as well,” said Fernandini, now Voluna’s chief technology officer.
Not rocket science
Strange said on a recent podcast he went to Harvard after working for Blue Origin and Astranis to “rethink my next step”. He became convinced terrestrial mineral exploration was “an obvious fit for us to take this technology that I’d been brainstorming a business model around”.
“We’re realising there is a real opportunity to leverage miniaturised neutron generator systems as well as advanced autonomous systems like drones that have in the last 3-5 years dramatically improved in capability,” Strange (below) said.
“And when you package these novel sensors with these autonomous systems what you can actually do is cover large land packages quite quickly [and] understand the geochemistry without digging holes and without taking rock-chip samples or collecting soils.
“You can collect that data and then in the same day have the results to accelerate your decision-making.”
In Canada, five-year-old Ottawa-based software company Foresight Spatial Labs says it is building “the world’s most advanced Spatial SDK for engineering and physical AI”. CEO Julian Ramirez Ruiseco, a mining engineer with a track record of commercialising mining spatial tools, says the firm has created foundational SDK infrastructure for spatial and perception computing.
“Our software stack powers the next generation of applications that sense, process and reason about the physical world,” he says.
Foresight claims its software is already “widely used in mining”. “Our technology is built on a commitment to mathematical accuracy, computational efficiency and the kind of version-controlled, collaborative data management that production-grade spatial applications require,” it says.
Chemical engineer Drew Moxon worked in senior management roles at Canadian direct lithium extraction company Summit Nanotech from 2020 to 2024 before creating Chemshift Technologies, a Calgary-based company he says is building a low-cost crude lithium refining platform with proprietary impurity-removal technology.
Chemshift says Canada ships more than 60% of its raw lithium to China for refining. Its technology could allow this refining to be done domestically. “Mining companies are unable to meet the cathode active materials [CAM] product specification,” it says. “We take crude lithium products and refine them to create a consistent, on-spec material for direct use in electric vehicle batteries. Using Chemshift’s planet-centric technology we intend to launch a North American-centric lithium supply chain.”
Material difference
In Europe, Cambridge, England-based Material Difference was formed last year by mechanical engineer Gabriel Yoong and mining geophysicist Luke Cullen. The start-up is in stealth mode but says it is “building AI that understands the underground to solve the $5.3 trillion critical mineral shortage”. Their current unassuming web landing page proffers the catchy: “Looking for something? So are we, just faster.”
Over in Berlin, seven-year-old Watergenics describes itself as a water-data company with a groundbreaking technology that combines optics, photonics and AI for water quality measurements. Its proprietary ABAIA sensor-module that provides real-time water-data monitoring has current and planned installations around the world. “To make water quality visible in real-time and in harsh water conditions, we transform vibrational spectroscopy data into insights to improve operations,” the company says. “Our customers in mining, lithium recovery and desalination get instant awareness – no waiting for days for the lab results.”
CEO and founder Dr Liviu Mantescu spent time as a visiting post-graduate at the University of California and VC money from that state – from Toba Capital, Echo River Capital and KD Venture Partners – and also from New York (Redbeard Ventures) has already been pumped into Watergenics.
Earlier this year it was named the #1 Innovative Tech Company in Berlin by Vienna-based researcher StartUs Insights.
“We are not building gadgets. We are building the digital infrastructure for water safety,” Watergenics says.
