AI Startup Discovers Metal Deposits in Australia

Australian startup Earth AI made a breakthrough in mineral exploration, discovering significant deposits of critically important minerals in regions that have been ignored by traditional mining companies for decades.

The company discovered deposits of copper, cobalt, and gold in the Northern Territory of Australia, as well as deposits of silver, molybdenum, and tin in New South Wales, 500 kilometers northwest of Sydney.

“The real frontier in the mining industry today is not geographical, but technological,” said Earth AI founder and CEO Roman Teslyuk in an interview with TechCrunch.

The success story began during Teslyuk’s doctoral studies at the University of Sydney, where he studied the features of the Australian mining industry. The key advantage was access to the national archive of geological exploration data, which has been compiled since the 1970s. “For some reason, nobody was using this data. I decided to create an algorithm that could learn from the successes and failures of millions of past geologists to make more accurate predictions,” Teslyuk explained.

Initially, Earth AI developed as a software company but faced industry conservatism. “In mining, anything that goes beyond approved dogma is considered heresy,” noted the founder. This forced the startup to develop its own drilling equipment to confirm AI predictions.

After participating in Y Combinator accelerator in spring 2019, the company spent several years perfecting its technologies. In January 2025, Earth AI raised $20 million in a Series B round. Unlike competitors such as KoBold (which recently announced the discovery of the largest copper deposit in Zambia in a decade), Earth AI’s algorithms specialize in rapidly scanning vast territories to find missed deposits.