KoBold Metals, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered mineral exploration company backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, has raised $192.5m in a Series B funding round.
Based in California, KoBold Metals is focused on employing AI to find metals such as cobalt, nickel, copper, and lithium, which are used in manufacturing electric vehicle batteries.
The company’s Series B financing round was led by US-based investment management firm T. Rowe Price.
New investors of KoBold Metals who participated in the funding round include Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board, Standard Investments, BHP Ventures, Mitsubishi, Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects, and Sarah Kunst’s Cleo Capital.
KoBold Metals received further investment from its existing investors such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Equinor.
In a tweet, KoBold Metals said: “A terrific set of new investors have backed KoBold and our mission to discover the critical materials we need to electrify the economy.”
The company is said to leverage modern artificial intelligence and cloud computing techniques for predicting the composition of the subsurface.
It has created a data platform called TerraShed, which has been designed to aggregate and structure huge collections of scientific data, to make it quickly available for analysis.
KoBold Metals’ suite of algorithms called Machine Prospector is said to interrogate that data with a variety of techniques, including machine learning and computer vision among others to predict the subsurface composition in a statistically valid manner.
Last September, KoBold Metals entered into a partnership with BHP with an objective to find new battery minerals in Australia and other countries.
Prior to that, the mineral exploration company signed a joint venture deal with UK-based Bluejay Mining to earn a 51% stake in the latter’s Disko-Nuussuaq nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum magmatic massive sulphide project in Greenland.
