Investment ploughed into start-ups for raw materials and mining tech
Seven start-ups are receiving funding to support mining exploration, processing and critical minerals recovery.
A Founders Factory and Rio Tinto mining tech accelerator is investing in six start-ups selected from more than 500 applications received over four months.
This cohort is targeting exploration and processing technologies for iron ore, copper, lithium and critical minerals.
The six companies will be able to test, pilot and commercialise their products through the Rio Tinto partnership. These are:
- Foresight Spatial Labs, Canada – advanced spatial software development kits for engineering and physical AI
- Chemshift, Canada – low-cost technology platforms for refining crude lithium products into battery-grade materials
- Supra, USA – creating supramolecular cartridges for high-purity critical minerals
- Material Difference, UK – operationalising explainable AI and value-of-information as an unfair advantage in resource delineation
- Voluna, USA – autonomous airborne neutron technology that delivers real-time geochemical mapping for mineral exploration
- Watergenics, Germany – real-time analysis of industrial aqueous streams
The accelerator’s first 18 investments have since secured over US$120mln in follow-on funding.
Meanwhile, EIT RawMaterials is investing €1.5mln in Finnish company Sensmet, which is developing a continuous metals monitoring technology to help secure the supply of critical and strategically important raw materials.
The investment is supported by EU body the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
Sensmet will use the funds to leverage the scale-up and deployment of its µDOES online metals analysers to enable and enhance the recovery of critical metals for the digital economy.
The company’s CEO, Dr Toni Laurila, explains that their technology ‘provides process managers with continuous measurements for key metals within liquid process streams. This enables them, for example, to extract critically important metals much more efficiently than would have been previously possible when relying on laboratory analysis.’
The technology can reportedly be deployed in numerous applications within raw material value chains, including wastewater treatment, battery recycling, lithium production and fertilizer manufacture.
