Earth AI’s algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored
Last summer, starting the mining Kobold made a splash when it said that in Zambia it had discovered one of the world’s largest copper deposits in more than a decade.
Now, another startup, Earth AIWAN told exclusively about his own discovery: promising deposits of critical minerals in parts of Australia that other mining outfits had ignored for decades. Although it is still not known whether they are as great as Kobold’s, the news suggests that future supplies of critical minerals will probably arise from a combination of field data that is dissected by artificial intelligence.
“The real, real boundary [in mining] Is not so much geographical as it is technological, “Roman Teslyuk, founder and CEO of Earth Ai, told WAN.
Earth Ai has identified deposits of copper, cobalt and gold in the northern territory and silver, Molybdenen and Tin in another location in New South Wales, 310 kilometers (500 kilometers) northwest of Sydney.
Earth AI came from the graduated studies of Tlyuk. Tlyuk, from Ukraine, worked on a doctorate at the University of Sydney, where he became familiar with the mining industry in Australia. There the government has the rights to mineral deposits, and leasing them in six years. Since the 1970s, he said, exploration companies must submit their data to a National Archives.
“For some reason, nobody uses them,” he said. “If I could build an algorithm that can absorb all that knowledge and learn in the past from the failures and successes of millions of geologists, I can make much better predictions about where I can find minerals in the future.”
Tlyuk started Earth AI as a software company that focused on making predictions about potential deposits and then approaching customers who may be interested in further exploring sites. But the customers hesitated to invest, partly because they did not want to bet millions on the predictions of an unproven technology.
“Mijnbouw is a very conservative industry,” Teslyuk said. “Everything outside the approved dogma is considered heresy.”
So Earth Ai decided to develop his own drilling equipment to prove that the sites that identified were just as promising as his software suggested. The company was accepted for the Cohort of Y Combinator’s Spring 2019 and it spent in the coming years refining its hardware and software. In January, Earth Ai has collected a series B of $ 20 million.
Although the company uses AI to look for minerals such as Kobold, Tlyuk says it needs a different tack. The algorithms of Earth Ai, he said, are quickly and efficiently trained in scanning broad areas to find deposits that would have been overlooked.
“The way in which we were explored in the past for metals, the 20one century, it just takes very, very long. It takes decades to find something, “Teslyuk said.” With the modern pace of the world you just can’t wait that long. “
