KoBold Metals closed a $537 million Series C round on Wednesday to help build a multibillion-dollar mine to exploit a copper deposit it found using AI.
The new round of funding, which was led by Durable Capital Partners and T Rowe Price, will be used to expand the company’s exploration efforts across five continents and develop a massive copper deposit in Zambia. The funding round pushed KoBold’s valuation to $2.96 billion, according to the Financial Times.
The final closing of the round gave the company $10 million more than it originally expected to raise. TechCrunch exclusively reported on the fundraising in October.
Few industries are as ripe for technological disruption as mining. The business is extremely risky: only about three out of every 1,000 possible deposits are commercially viable.
KoBold, which was founded in 2018, uses AI to comb through massive sets of geological data in an effort to improve success rates. The company’s decision to develop the Zambia resource, which it estimates is among the largest ever found, suggests this approach could pay off big.
Critical minerals have grown in importance in recent years as the US and China clash over supplies. China has already banned antimony, gallium and germanium shipments to the US and today proposed limiting lithium and gallium processing technologies.
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.
