A Mining Startup Is Using AI to Find Minerals Faster and Cheaper

Earth AI, an Austrian company, just raised $20 million in funding on February 27, 2025. The company uses artificial intelligence to help find minerals buried underground — a process that traditionally takes years and costs a lot of money.

The funding is significant because Earth AI has already delivered results. In 2023, the company found three valuable mineral deposits — molybdenum, palladium, and lead with silver — while spending only $2.1 million. Finding minerals that cheaply and that successfully is rare in the mining industry.

How Earth AI Is Different

Most mining exploration companies hire other firms to drill the ground and look for minerals. Earth AI does something different. The company owns its own drilling equipment and runs drilling operations year-round, continuously collecting underground data that feeds into its AI models.

The company's founder and CEO, Roman Teslyuk, is a geologist with 10 years of industry experience who started Earth AI after going through Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, in 2019. His company currently focuses on greenfield exploration — searching for minerals in areas where none have been found before — in Australia, where the landscape and regulations work well for this approach.

Why This Matters Right Now

Other companies are also developing AI tools for mineral discovery. GeologicAI raised $44 million in funding around the same time, and acquired another company called Lumo Analytics to expand its capabilities across different types of minerals.

The rush to develop these technologies is driven by one major concern: access to critical minerals. Many modern technologies — from electric vehicle batteries to semiconductor chips — depend on minerals like rare earth elements, and most of the world's supply comes from China. This has made Western governments and companies nervous about relying on a single country for something so essential to their industries.

China understands this advantage and is making the most of it. Chinese companies like BYD own their own mineral mines and processing facilities, which helps them keep costs low and maintain control. This level of control — owning everything from the ground where minerals are extracted all the way to the finished product — is what concerns policymakers in the US and Europe.

The Broader Context

There is a pattern worth recognizing here. When expensive industries with complex problems have adopted AI before, the results have been meaningful. Thirty years ago, the semiconductor industry switched from having engineers hand-draw chip designs to using AI-powered software tools. That shift made chip design faster, more accurate, and cheaper. Finding minerals underground has some similarities: it involves spotting patterns in large amounts of data, requires significant upfront investment, and improves over time as computers collect more information.

If AI can do for mineral exploration what those software tools did for chip design, it could change how quickly and cheaply we find the minerals that modern technology depends on. That is genuinely important given the supply-chain tensions now shaping global trade.

What Comes Next

Earth AI, which has about 11 to 50 employees, plans to use its new funding to expand its drilling operations and improve its AI models. The real test, though, will come later: can the company actually turn the minerals it finds into working mines that produce minerals at a profit.

Traditional mining companies have long dominated this industry by owning everything from exploration to extraction. If newer, AI-powered startups can find minerals more reliably and more cheaply, the older companies may need to change how they operate. Whether that actually happens depends on whether these early successes hold up when scaled to larger operations.