A Berkeley startup just raised nearly $200 million to fuel its metal mining ambitions.
KoBold announced the $192.5 million Series B led by T. Rowe Price on Thursday. Other investors included CPP Investments, Bond Cap, BHP Ventures, Mitsubishi, Apollo Projects, Cleo Capital, Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy, Andreessen Horowitz and Equinor. Lyft President John Zimmer also participated, according to the WSJ.
The company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to more efficiently identify land and mine metals needed for electric vehicle production, including cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium.
“Fully electrifying the global economy is our generation’s greatest challenge; partnering with this broad set of world-class investors will accelerate our efforts to find the key materials for the EV revolution,” co-founder and CEO Kurt House said via email.
The company only explores sites that it owns or co-owns or that falls under a partnership with a mining company. Those industry partners currently include Australia-based BHP and Greenland-based Bluejay Mining.
And it currently has exploration projects in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Greenland and Zambia, according to the WSJ.
KoBold was co-founded in 2018 by House, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Jurinak and CFO/CTO Josh Goldman.
The team is building “a Google Maps for the Earth’s crust,” a16z General Partner Connie Chan told the WSJ in September. “It’s very much just a different approach to mining; a long-term, science-driven way to mine."
It doesn't license or contract out its services, though.
“KoBold creates value by discovering new ore deposits and expanding existing resources,” the company said in a statement. “The company realizes that value by investing its capital in exploration and owning all or a portion of the mineral resources discovered.”
Demand for mined metals has increased with the popularization of electric vehicles, which need long-lasting, rechargeable batteries to compete with the ranges offered by traditional combustion engine vehicles.
At a so-called Battery Day event in 2020, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would be phasing out its use of cobalt and was designing a state-of-art "tabless" battery. A few days later, Tesla also secured lithium mining rights in Nevada, according to Bloomberg News.
There are 140,000 metric tons of cobalt mined annually, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia and Zambia, according to a 2020 report from Statista.
