Durin digs $3.4 million and automates drills for critical mineral exploration

Finding new sources of important minerals is a costly business. Around the world, companies spent $1.2-13 billion exploring in 2023.

Results: Mining is the definition of hit or miss business. Today’s businesses use advanced models of the Earth’s crust to identify the best prospects, but even so, only about three of the 1,000 attempts to find deposits have been successful. Prospectors still have to dig deeper into the earth, and they must lift the rock core to prove that their foreboding is correct.

“About 70% of the capital raised by the exploration company will be excavated,” Durin founder and CEO Ted Feldmann told TechCrunch. “Drilling is very expensive.”

So, Feldman, who grew up in a mining family, is married to robotics and drilling rigs in an attempt to keep costs down.

In mineral exploration, excavation is usually contracted to a specialized company, which is largely defined by salary. “Labor is about 60% of the cost,” Feldman said. “This really comes down to labor issues. There are not enough excavators in the US.”

At the site, there are usually two or three people operating the drilling rig. One or two of them leave the machine with pipes and liquid supply, while the rest operates the machine. “He’s basically listening to the rigs and interprets the rock-like things he’s experiencing and adjusts a few different parameters based on what he hears and sees on some gauges.”

Feldman believes much of this work can be automated. To roll the ball, Durin raised $3.4 million in a pre-seed round led by 8090 Industries, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. Also featured in 1517 were Andreessen Horowitz, Bedrock, Champion Hill, and the reverse, day 1 venture, Lux Capital.

Durin began designing its first drilling rig earlier this year, but it can bore a hole that is 300 meters deep and 2.5 inches wide. It’s still manipulated manually, but with sensors, it collects data so that it can be built to guide future automatic models. Also, because the drill has holes deep inside the globe, Dorin is building a mechanism to automatically load the pipes.

The startup is embarking on its first drilling program, and by the end of the year Feldman believes that Durin has enough data to begin building an automated model. In two or three years, he expects the drill rig to work unmanned.

The drilling company still needs people on site, but they plan to deliver supplies, monitor progress and obtain the completed core samples at the end of the day.

“What we’re trying to eliminate is that we need someone to stand around the rig while it’s operating,” Feldman said.