This Bill Gates-Backed AI Mining Company Is Eyeing a $2 Billion Valuation

KoBold Metals is proving that artificial intelligence and mining can go hand-in-hand.

The Berkeley, California-based company, which uses AI to search for minerals crucial for electric vehicles, raised $195 million in June 2023 at a valuation of about $1 billion. With its next funding round, that valuation could double to more than $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Founded in 2018, KoBold raised a round of funding in 2023 that included investment from global asset manager T. Rowe Price, as well as existing investors such as Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Aside from the Microsoft co-founder, Breakthrough Energy Ventures also boasts other major names on its board of investors including Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.The firm revealed in a July filing with the Securities Exchange Commission that it has raised $839 million toward its third flagship fund.

KoBold uses AI to streamline the process of discovering minerals that are crucial to the clean energy transition. That includes lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt. Company president Josh Goldman and CEO Kurt House said KoBold gathers a vast array of pre-existing data sets from sources that range from “state-of-the-art mass spectrometry measurements to hundred-year-old maps hand-painted on linen” in service of locating deep earth mineral deposits in an op-ed in IEEE Spectrum.

The company’s data system combs through and organizes the information, and its algorithms guide decision-making. In Quebec, for example, Goldman and House wrote that they used regional geology data to train machine learning models, supplementing that information with insights from geologists. The team ultimately found nickel sulfide mineralization in eight out of 10 exploration holes they dug.

Although KoBold started as exclusively an exploration company, it recently pushed into actual mining, following the February discovery of a copper deposit in Zambia, the Journal reported. At the time, Goldman described it as “one of the world’s biggest high-grade large copper mines.”

The types of minerals KoBold is targeting, like lithium, are crucial components in EV batteries. The Biden Administration has heavily incentivized North American extraction and processing of these minerals, but experts say improved relationships with mineral-rich regions, like Africa, could be key to cutting down reliance on China, which currently dominates the EV battery supply chain, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies and Bloomberg.