KoBold Metals Raises $192.5 Million to Use AI to Find Battery Minerals

Angel investors included

Scott Belsky,

a startup investor and chief product officer at Adobe Inc., and Lyft Inc. President John Zimmer, while existing backers Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and

Equinor

EQNR 1.93%

Ventures, the startup investing arm of Norwegian energy giant Equinor ASA, also joined the round.

KoBold, founded in 2018, says it can change the way minerals are discovered by mining data for clues about where deposits of cobalt, copper, nickel or lithium might be found in the Earth’s crust.

KoBold says it uses AI to guide where to procure land, what data to collect, and where to drill. It has collected publicly available data from company disclosures and government sources, as well as historical information from companies it partners with. Its algorithms then crunch that data in search of patterns.

Global miners say exploring for metals is getting tougher as demand is accelerating for materials used in the transition away from fossil fuels. As a result, they expect to look for new deposits much deeper beneath the surface or in countries that pose greater risks to their business, including through resources nationalism.

Investors worry the world is on track for large shortages of battery materials that could hinder the shift toward a low-carbon economy.

KoBold aims to change the mind-set of an industry that has long relied heavily on sampling soil and sediment and drilling holes in the ground to determine whether areas contain valuable minerals. While the company still leans on those techniques, it hopes to limit the chances of failure by drawing on machine learning and other scientific computing techniques.

In September, KoBold formed an exploration alliance with BHP, the world’s largest mining company by market value. It is one of a number of partnerships it has with resources companies world-wide.

“Globally, shallow ore deposits have largely been discovered, and remaining resources are likely deeper underground and harder to see from the surface,” BHP’s head of metals exploration, Keenan Jennings, said at the time. Miners will need to adopt new ways of working to unearth the next generation of essential materials, he said.

Some other miners including Anglo American PLC and technology-focused companies are also looking at how artificial intelligence might allow minerals to be found more easily, but those efforts haven’t yet led to many big discoveries of critical commodities.

Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said KoBold is aiming to build “a Google Maps for the Earth’s crust.”

“It’s very much just a different approach to mining; a long-term, science-driven way to mine,” Ms. Chan said in an interview in September.

Still, some mining executives remain skeptical of the benefits of artificial intelligence in an industry where commodity-price cycles have long balanced supply and demand by attracting new investments when prices are high and deterring it when they are low.

Miners have already adopted AI to smooth other operations, such as the scheduling of trains.

The funds from KoBold’s new investor syndicate will be used to accelerate efforts to find critical battery materials, one of the people said. It is currently working on exploration projects in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Greenland and Zambia.

KoBold hasn’t disclosed how much it raised in its Series A financing round or its valuation.

The World Economic Forum in June included KoBold among a class of 100 companies deemed pioneers in technology, the same honor it once bestowed on a young Google Inc.

Write to Rhiannon Hoyle at [email protected]