Durin digs up $3.4M to automate drills for critical minerals exploration

Finding new sources of critical minerals is a costly business. Worldwide, companies spent $12 to $13 billion on exploration in 2023. The upshot: mining is the definition of a hit-or-miss business. Companies today use advanced models of the Earth’s crust to pinpoint the best prospects, but even then only about three out of 1,000 attempts to find a deposit are successful. Prospectors still have to drill deep into the Earth, pulling up cores of rock to prove if their hunch was correct. “About 70% of the the capital that exploration companies raise goes to drilling,” Ted Feldmann, founder and CEO of Durin, told TechCrunch. “Drilling is prohibitively expensive.” So Feldmann, who grew up in a mining family, is marrying robotics with drilling rigs in an attempt to drive down the cost. In minerals exploration, drilling is typically contracted out to specialized companies whose costs are largely defined by their payroll. “Labor is about 60% of their cost,” Feldmann said. “This really comes ... Read full article.