KoBold used artificial intelligence to find copper — and now investors are piling in as much as $537 million
KoBold Metals closed a $537 million Series C round on Wednesday to help build a multibillion-dollar mine to exploit copper deposits it found using artificial intelligence.
The new financing round, led by Dural Capital Partners and T. Rowe Price, to expand the company’s exploration efforts on five continents and develop a huge copper deposit in Zambia. The funding round pushed KoBold’s valuation to $2.96 billion. According to For the Financial Times.
The final closing of the round netted the company $10 million more than it initially expected to raise. TechCrunch Reported exclusively At the fundraiser in October.
There are few industries as ready for technological transformation as mining. This business is notoriously risky: only about three out of every 1,000 potential deposits are commercially viable.
KoBold, founded in 2018, uses artificial intelligence to comb through massive geological data sets in an effort to improve the success rate. The company’s decision to develop the resource in Zambia, which it estimates are among the largest ever found, suggests that this approach could pay off well.
The importance of critical minerals has increased in recent years with the dispute between the United States and China over supplies. China has already banned shipments of antimony, gallium, and germanium to the United States, and today it proposed doing so Restricting techniques For processing lithium and gallium.
Andreessen Horowitz, Bond, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Earthshot VC, Equinor, July Fund, Mitsubishi, Standard Investments, StepStone, and WCM Investment Management also participated in the round. Previous investors include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Ma.
