Metal markets may be fragmenting but for the emergent global mining technology sector the dominant trend is convergence. Experienced mining leader Laura Tyler said at a big 2025 mining event in Australia computational power, AI and robotics had moved society and industry to the “next portal of development and discovery”.
Automation and robotics were set to change today’s work and workplaces. New scientific revolutions could potentially change “how we extract resources tomorrow”, she said.
But it is not just technological confluence creating a foundation for mining and metals technology firms to become more influential and more investible.
The industry is seeing, finally, a coming together of capital markets and mining and metals tech. Traditional equipment manufacturers are bolting on tech and tech companies. And mining’s widening public aperture is increasing scrutiny of its operational deficiencies and vulnerabilities – energy, water, sub-surface insight, health and safety are just a few of the areas – and the technology available to address them.
Add geopolitics and the race to build, or rebuild, sovereign industrial capability to this mix and the momentum behind a nascent mining and metals tech sector is unmistakable. “We’re just beginning the broader critical minerals super cycle,” Orion Industrial Ventures managing partner Mark Frayman said at Australia’s IMARC conference in December. OIV has just closed its first minerals, materials and energy tech fund. “It’s [minerals] at the forefront of all geopolitical discussions globally. We'll see technology and technology access, much like it is in semiconductors, become really strategic and the leading start-ups will get government funding. We’ll start to see really large influxes of capital come into the sector.”
Frayman said this month innovation was a key to “identifying, developing and operating natural resource assets at viable economics and in a sustainable way”.
“We believe the emerging companies developing these technologies today will scale into the leading mining and mining service companies of tomorrow,” he said.
Mining and metals technology is not yet recognised – by investors, government or even the mining industry itself – as a separate stratum of the circa-US$200 billion-a-year mining equipment, technology and services (METS) vertical.
However, there are clear trends moving the sector to a new level of prominence, among them the repositioning of METS majors as tech companies rather than equipment or service entities.
Major themes elevating the profile of mining and metals tech in 2026 are:
- Surging tech financing and M&A
- Growth in demand for automation, operational edge control and AI in mining
- Increased material recycling and mine tailings reprocessing
- Geopolitics and sovereign supply chains
- Water pressures and scarcity
- Biotech and AI convergence
- New public mining and metals tech champions
- A critical need for greater sub-surface visibility and insight
- Coarse ore grinding and flotation breakthroughs
- OEMs using tech to grow the aftermarket pie
Show me the money
Circa-US$15 billion of mining and metals technology financing and M&A from 2021 to 2025 is a drop in the proverbial ocean of global tech deals in that time but is unprecedented for the niche space.
Last year produced a new high watermark for mining and metals tech deal-making with more than $4.8 billion of transactions beating the previous record level of $3.03 billion in 2021 when Bentley Systems paid more than $1 billion for Seequent and Sandvik bought Deswik in another sector megadeal.
