Founders Factory has established a new Mining Tech Accelerator as part of its partnership with Rio Tinto to find breakthrough technologies in the mining industry to support the miner’s mission to find better ways to provide the materials the world needs.
Founders Factory teamed up with Rio Tinto in April, with the miner to invest AUS$14.4 million in global pre-seed and seed stage start-ups over the next three years. The investment will focus on technologies in the fields of safe mine operations, decarbonisation, exploration processing, and automation.
The first cohort of startups have now been selected to go through the newly-established Mining Tech Accelerator. These are:
- Endolith – increases copper recovery from low-grade ores in heap leaches by harnessing microbial communities, synthetic biology techniques, and a cloud-native platform (Denver, USA).
- ProSpectral – next generation computer vision for material detection and analysis (Cambridge, UK).
- BluumBio – enzyme database for removing pollutants from soil, air, and water (Berkeley, USA).
- Sunchem – developing sustainable leaching and Nano Filter technologies for the precision separation of critical metals (Berkeley, USA).
- Vycarb – developing, deploying, and marketing tools that enable billion-tonne fully-measured carbon dioxide removal and storage (Brooklyn, USA).
- Magmatic – building a library of metal-binding proteins, focusing initially on lithium…
