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 down to a labor problem. There are not nearly enough drillers in the United States.”
On site, there are usually two to three people operating a drilling rig. One or two of them are there to keep the machine supplied with pipe and fluids, while the remainder operates the machinery. “He is basically listening to the rig, and based on what he’s hearing and seeing on a few gages, he’s interpreting the sort of rock that he’s going through, then adjusting a few different parameters.”
Feldmann thinks that much of this work can be automated. To get the ball rolling, Durin has raised $3.4 million in a pre-seed round led by 8090 Industries, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Also participating were 1517, Andreessen Horowitz, Bedrock, Champion Hill, Contrary, Day One Ventures, and Lux Capital.
Durin started designing its first drilling rig earlier this year, and it’s capable of boring a hole 300 meters deep and 2.5 inches wide. It’s still manually operated, but festooned with sensors to gather data so that the company can build a model to guide future automated models. Durin is also building a contraption to automatically load pipe as the drill bores deeper into the Earth.
The startup is embarking on its first drilling program, and by the end of the year, Feldmann thinks Durin will have enough data to start building its automation model. In two to three years, he anticipates that drill rigs could run unattended.
Drilling companies will still need people on site, he said, but they’ll be delivering supplies, monitoring progress, and retrieving completed core samples at the end of the day.
“What we’re trying to eliminate is a need for there to be guys standing around the rig while it’s operating,” Feldmann said.
