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Founders: Alex Miltenberger, Tyler Hall
Motto/Mission: Find minerals faster.
Year Founded: 2023
Stage: Pre-Seed
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?
Alex & Tyler: We both met in grad school in 2017, as two first-year PhD students both coming from mining backgrounds. The world’s changed a lot since 2017. There’s been a push towards electrification, supply chain disruption during Covid, and geopolitical shifts. Over time, it became clear that building a prosperous society meant having a robust, domestic mineral supply. And that starts with exploration. The existing industry has severe structural problems that have left the incumbents paralyzed and unable to adapt to the changing conditions. As talented geoscientists, we saw an opportunity to explore faster and more efficiently by leveraging technology the right way. So we founded ExploreTech and got started.
Climate Capital: What are you building?
Alex & Tyler: If we achieve our goals, then we will reduce the time it takes to make a mineral discovery from 10+ years to 1 or 2 years. The consequences of this would be immense. Copper, lithium, nickel, and rare earths will be abundant. The global electric grid will be updated. The cost of electric vehicles would go down. The negative social and environmental impacts of mining would be minimized.
Climate Capital: What is next?
Alex & Tyler: Before raising our recent pre-seed round, we bootstrapped as a tech-enabled service provider for a year. We worked with 15 different exploration companies, getting exposed to many types of teams and projects. The services revenue funded the development of Inverter and Driller, our cloud-based geophysics and drilling optimization APIs. The algorithms were successfully tested with real-world drilling, showing that our approach does lead to faster and more effective exploration. These successes gave us the confidence to raise capital and move towards owning the mining claims ourselves.
Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?
Alex & Tyler: There’s not a day that goes by where the two of us don’t talk. We’re always in sync. It’s been critical to making it this far. In our view, the key ingredients are open communication, alignment, and intensity. Open communication because we want to know how each other are thinking and feeling at all times without judgment. Alignment because intentionally aligning incentives leads to better outcomes for all. And intensity because what we’re doing is hard. As we expand the team, we’re developing ways to instill those values into the core company culture.
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?
Alex & Tyler: For one, bootstrapping a tech-enabled services business straight out of grad school with limited savings, in a market that is chronically under-funded, is hard. We learned the hard way a few times that you have to be diligent about cash flow and spending money on only the things that have a clear return on investment in a reasonable time frame. The emotional toll of the ups and downs can also be tough, but it helps to have a supportive team.
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?
Alex & Tyler: Founders love talking with other founders. Nothing beats having a strong community of fellow founders you can connect with who are all experiencing the same things as you.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?
Alex & Tyler: We are hiring a Founding Geophysicist! If that sounds like you, and you want to make a difference in the world, we’d love to work with you. See open roles and apply at exploretech.ai/careers.
If you want to learn more, visit https://exploretech.ai/!