Verified Job
Work from home
Co-Founder & CTO, New Venture: AI-Native Critical Mineral Discovery Company- job post Diagram Ve
Work from home
#771505
Remote / WFH
Diagram Ventures
Job Description
Full job description
The Opportunity
The energy transition runs on metals. The IEA projects critical mineral demand to more than double by 2040. Copper faces a 25% supply shortfall by 2035, and lithium is worse at up to 40%. Nickel, cobalt, and rare earths are all in deficit. New processing and recycling tech close maybe 10% to 30% of that gap. The rest has to come from new mines.
The bottleneck starts at discovery:
High failure rates: Only one in 1,000 early-stage exploration projects ever becomes an economic mine.
Escalating costs: The average discovery now costs C$240M, up 60% in two decades. The easy deposits are gone; what remains is deeper and harder to detect.
Fragmented data: Decades of exploration data sit trapped in government archives, company filings, and handwritten drill logs. Geologists spend 50% to 80% of their time manipulating data.
Expensive guesswork: Targeting decisions remain largely empirical and blind. A single misdirected drill campaign burns C$500K to C$2M.
We are building Canada's first AI-native critical mineral discovery company. We turn multi-modal geoscience data into ranked targets, acquire the best properties, and run field validation to reduce uncertainty before a drill goes in the ground. We compress what traditionally takes exploration teams years into months at a fraction of the cost, optimizing for major discoveries that redefine mining districts and supply critical minerals for decades.
Previous AI exploration tools failed because they overfit on known deposits and output prospectivity maps with no traceable geological rationale or uncertainty scores. Nobody has combined the right expertise, data pipeline, and model architecture to actually make it work. The timing is now, and Canada is the right place to start. Modern AI models can finally process scanned PDFs and handwritten logs at scale. Canada offers the deepest public geoscience data infrastructure globally, and the federal government actively subsidizes critical mineral exploration.
The Opportunity
The energy transition runs on metals. The IEA projects critical mineral demand to more than double by 2040. Copper faces a 25% supply shortfall by 2035, and lithium is worse at up to 40%. Nickel, cobalt, and rare earths are all in deficit. New processing and recycling tech close maybe 10% to 30% of that gap. The rest has to come from new mines.
The bottleneck starts at discovery:
High failure rates: Only one in 1,000 early-stage exploration projects ever becomes an economic mine.
Escalating costs: The average discovery now costs C$240M, up 60% in two decades. The easy deposits are gone; what remains is deeper and harder to detect.
Fragmented data: Decades of exploration data sit trapped in government archives, company filings, and handwritten drill logs. Geologists spend 50% to 80% of their time manipulating data.
Expensive guesswork: Targeting decisions remain largely empirical and blind. A single misdirected drill campaign burns C$500K to C$2M.
We are building Canada's first AI-native critical mineral discovery company. We turn multi-modal geoscience data into ranked targets, acquire the best properties, and run field validation to reduce uncertainty before a drill goes in the ground. We compress what traditionally takes exploration teams years into months at a fraction of the cost, optimizing for major discoveries that redefine mining districts and supply critical minerals for decades.
Previous AI exploration tools failed because they overfit on known deposits and output prospectivity maps with no traceable geological rationale or uncertainty scores. Nobody has combined the right expertise, data pipeline, and model architecture to actually make it work. The timing is now, and Canada is the right place to start. Modern AI models can finally process scanned PDFs and handwritten logs at scale. Canada offers the deepest public geoscience data infrastructure globally, and the federal government actively subsidizes critical mineral exploration.
