Mariana Minerals emerges from stealth with $65M Series A led by a16z and Breakthrough Energy to modernize mining

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Well, we have the founder of Mariana Minerals uh joining the show. Welcome to the stream. Hit the soundboard. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Turner? Good. How you doing, guys? Beautiful map behind you. I I I love cgraphy. Uh I'm a big fan of of of throwing a map in the background.

Is that 3D or like does it have texture or does it just kind of look it look like? Uh it's got a little bit of texture. Good. Not not crazy 3D though. the Mercer projection. I'm pretty sure it's a good one. Anyway, introduce yourself. What do you do? Welcome to the show. Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me on, guys.

Uh Turner Calwell here, CEO of Mariana Minerals. Uh we're a vertically integrated software first mining company. So, we're coming into projects uh that are, you know, have post exploration. They've discovered the mineral deposit. Um and we come in to engineer it.

So we develop the mine plan, we develop the refining plan, uh we capitalize it at the project level and from the top co and then we we manage the construction, we manage the constru the commissioning and then we operate it out into perpetuity. Okay.

Talk to me about the whole pipeline of actually getting minerals out of the ground. Let's say I own a 100,000 acres in Alaska or something. I bought it just as a forest. It's a ranch, never explored it. What are the steps? I imagine we're talking about like a decade, exploration firms, then you come in at some point.

Like really walk me through a concrete example of going from like someone has some land to now we're getting material. Well, yeah. And if if you're this verticalized, why not also do discovery? I'm sure there's a reason. I'm sure there's a reason.

There's a there's a there's a big market of folks that are doing discovery and there's actually a bunch of awesome like tech VC backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery.

I think what we're missing is folks that are focused on condensing the timelines from when you have discovered something to when it is actually producing and it's like this snake in the grass kind of challenge like very complicated system of actually designing these plants, flying out all the infrastructure, installing the infrastructure, getting it running.

Um but yeah, so you start with a you know flat piece of land, ideally it's flat. Um, and you'll start this like really long campaign of, you know, you'll start with kind of like spot testing of different areas to determine and probably some like surface sampling to determine if there's something promising there.

Uh, there's some permits that come into play when it when it when you have to actually start doing more advanced exploration campaigns and that's something that, you know, if you're on federal land and sometimes on state land, those permits can get in the way of of accelerating kind of mineral discovery.

Um, you'll do drill holes, uh, you know, hundreds to thousands of drill holes to define a mineral deposit. Um, and those mineral deposits can vary all over the place. You can have shallower ones where it's a little bit cheaper to drill.

You can have really deep ones where it starts to get much more expensive to do and timely time inensive to do that expiration campaign.

And all along the way, you are taking samples uh, and you are kind of building these three these 3D models to try to understand how was the deposit formed, why is the mineral there in the first place? And that helps to kind of inform also the the advancing the expiration side of things.

And in parallel with that, you're starting to do these testing campaigns where you're running concentration tests to figure out how you can upgrade the ore to an intermediate product.

Uh you're starting to do refining tests to understand how you would actually extract the target mineral into its final state, which is, you know, a high purity metal alloy in many cases. Um or a or a a high purity kind of specialty chemical salt. Um and so you're writing these reports all along the way.

So you'll start with a um a pea which is an initial economic assessment. You'll then do a prefeasibility study. You'll do a feasibility study. You'll do a definitive feasibility study. And kind of as you're doing that, the value of the asset is kind of increasing and increasing. Speculators are piling into the stock.

Um and the intent there for the specs, the backbone of the backbone of the mining penny stock rippers. That's right. And that that's how that exploration is is funded really. They're trying to like ride that first wave of value creation. Yeah. Similar to like FDA trials for new pharmaceuticals probably.

Well, I can and I can I can I'm starting to figure out, you know, a number of reasons while you're explaining them why you wouldn't want to do the exploration and discovery is because that could take like 10 years and then he goes on to describe the hardest thing in the world.

Well, yeah, but then but the other thing is like the duration ideally you start working with a customer and they're like, "Here's what we have in the ground. Help us get it out. " And then you can just start doing that. That's exactly right.

And that's that's how we're thinking about it is we want to be the ones that go from uh you know the folks that are doing the expiration, they're they're there to define the resource and ideally get some return on the invested capital that they had as they were kind of like going through this like long and arduous process of defining a mineral resource.

But typically those are geologists, financiers, lawyers. Um it's very rare where you'll see a a junior mining company that's actually staffed to take it all the way through to production. Mhm.

Um it's a it's a different class of business fundamentally like you're dealing with in in say like very high capex deployment uh complex kind of mining and and refining systems that you know span the the uh the entire ecosystem of like engineering skill sets, commercial skill sets.

Um and so there's a nice handoff point there. And so what happens today is the junior mining companies will spend a lot of time exploring. They'll increase the value of the asset. Ideally, they flip it to a large mining company that comes in to do the hard yards of actually getting the thing operating.

Um, and that's where we want to come in as well. So, uh, you know, the big mining companies, they're looking for billion dollar opportunities to deploy billions of dollars of capital. Um, and you know, they they pick their spots on the commodities also.

So, you might have a commodity that's out of favor and so no one's picking up the asset. You might have an asset that you know would be called subscale in this scenario where it's not a billion dollars of capex. It's only a couple hundred million dollars of capex. Still a big project. Um and those are getting ignored.

Um and so we think that with the differentiation on the tech stack on the software side of things that we're bringing in and also a differentiated team, we can bring these smaller scale assets which are like right sized for us as a as an early stage company um into production while they've been kind of ignored by the big mining companies.

All right. Uh, one more question and then we'll talk about the news today. But when did you first yearn for the mines? For the mines. Um, so when I graduated college, I actually had this like vision of moving to Australia and going and working in the mines. I never quite quite like converted on that.

Um, but uh worked at Tesla for nine years and change. Um, started out up in Reno, was working on the gigafactory up there, kind of like designing, building it. then started working on battery cell manufacturing, started working on areas of the cell chemistry, uh, and in the supply chain side of things.

Um, and as I was moving kind of further and further upstream, you know, the the mining industry is is wild. It's an awesome industry. Um, but it's definitely been neglected. Like, we've kind of been viewing it as dirty and, you know, it should happen. It should it should happen, but it shouldn't happen here.

Um, and it's also like this massive it's this awesome opportunity to work across scales.

like a lot of what you're developing starts at like the micron scale of like how do I get this atom out of this other atom well not atoms but this like atom out of this mineral um and then you have to scale that up to like kilometer scale infrastructure um and like that breadth of scales is awesome that's really cool what's the uh news today if I might yeah so we're ah there we go um we're coming out of stealth with our series A raise we had uh Andre's coast ventures breakthrough through Energy Ventures and a couple of other folks join in.

We've raised $65 million today. So, first uh first hit of the week. Feels so Feels good. Congratulations. Fantastic news. Fantastic. I'm uh last question before you jump off. Are you are you guys like acquiring any companies uh or or is it fully ground up? You're just Yeah.

So, we we'll we'll we'll step in and we'll acquire uh mineral assets. Um that that makes sense for us to step into. We're working on that in the copper space right now actually.

But that's like buying the land, not necessarily like basically buying the resource itself, not like a surrounding company or maybe it is structured as Yeah. So, it'll it'll it'll it'll vary.

There's a lot of mining projects that are on care and maintenance that, you know, h have were turned off and could be turned back on with, you know, if you come in and retrofit to deploy kind of like the reinforcement learning platform that we're working to deploy, which means you need more instrumentation, you need more control to be able to control the the big refinery, which is basically a big robot.

Um, and uh in certain cases, it it might be a a mine that's actually operating today that we can step into and we see opportunity for uplift. Um and in other areas it'll be a green field asset where you know we're stepping in and partnering in partnering with the resource owner.

Um and then we would have a cash flow uh split kind of once we bring it to commercial scale so that they can keep exploring and you kind of create this flywheel where they're continuing to explore.

They're leveraging cash flows from operating assets uh to to fund their exploration and then we would step in to to develop those those assets over time.

Um, so it's pretty variable, but yeah, we have So basically the market the market prices certain assets here and you guys look at it and say with our technology this is actually worth, you know, some some premium on that. That's exactly right.

And in certain cases, the market will say that there's no net asset value or no no NAV. Um, and we'll and that's an area where you can kind of step in and and get a good deal and bring it into bring it into production. He's a value minor, value investor. Um, this is super cool. Congratulations.

We uh I imag like we're going to do a lot more on uh rare earths broadly. So uh we're going to stop calling them rare because we got plenty. We're just going to call them earths. There are a lot out there. They're they're hard to find in high concentrations and and hard to get out, but they're they're out there.

Awesome. Well, congratulations uh to you and the team on the raise and uh hope hopefully have you back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Awesome. Appreciate it, guys. Cheers. Eight. Go to eight asleep. com. Get a Pod Five Ultra. They have a fiveyear warranty, a 30- night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

Get an eight sleep. We have our next guest coming in the studio. I got to give people the I'm so into the show. My HRV thinks that I'm done. So, thank