US venture firms, entrepreneur-run 50 Years, DCVC, Cantos Ventures, Promus Ventures, Gagarin Capital and Duro Ventures – plus Estonian firm Metaplanet – have contributed to a $US5.5 million seed-plus funding round for minerals prospecting technology company Earth AI.

High net-worth individual investors including Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt and former BHP chief commercial officer Arnoud Balhuizen have also supported the round.

The company was founded in Sydney in 2016 by geologist Roman Teslyuk.

Teslyuk received a master’s degree in geology from Ivan Franko University in his native Ukraine and then gained practical experience of prospecting working as a mining geologist in Russia. He later became a PhD candidate in geosciences at Sydney University. Teslyuk joined the university’s Incubate accelerator to test an idea he had to use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse mining data to provide pointers to the most prospective areas to search for new deposits. He approached mining companies with the idea and gained enough interest to drop his studies to form Earth AI.

The company raised seed funding of about $US1.7 million from AirTree Ventures, Blackbird Ventures and angel investors in 2017 and then raised a further seed round of up to $US2.5 million from AI-specialist firm Gagarin Capital in 2019. After that, Earth AI was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program in San Francisco and the company is now based in California.

Earth AI’s technology is suitable for prospecting for all metals but the company has focused on those most in demand for new technology manufacturing such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, vanadium, chromium, manganese, tin, tungsten, tantalum, niobium, palladium and molybdenum, as well as gold, silver and platinum.

The company has also developed hardware and systems to carry out low-impact, low-cost on-site testing to follow up on its predictions.

Earth AI has so far partnered with resources companies including Evolution Mining, Peel Mining, Australian Mines, Bligh Resources and Gindalbie Metals.

Image: Earth AI founder Roman Teslyuk.