Mining startup Terra AI raises $20 million in Series A with Khosla Ventures and BHP Ventures
Terra AI just closed a $20 million Series A round, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from BHP Ventures, the venture capital arm of one of the largest mining companies on the planet. The news was confirmed by the startup’s CEO and co-founder, John Mern.
The timing couldn’t be more strategic.
We’re living through a moment where the global race for critical minerals is accelerating with no signs of slowing down, and artificial intelligence is showing up to completely change the rules of the game inside the mines. Investors are pouring money into next-generation mining technologies and domestic projects aimed at meeting the growing demand for these resources.
Copper, rare earths, lithium… the need for these materials has never been higher, and finding them efficiently has become a strategic priority for countries and companies around the world.
That’s exactly where Terra AI enters the picture, with AI models capable of mapping underground resources far more accurately than traditional methods allow. 🚀
Why $20 million in AI-powered mining makes total sense right now
To understand the weight of this investment, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the global landscape. The energy transition the world is going through depends directly on critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare earths. These materials are the backbone of electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and a whole range of technologies that will define the coming decades. The problem is that finding these minerals underground has never been a simple or cheap task, and traditional prospecting methods have serious limitations in terms of accuracy, cost, and time.
It’s within this context that the funding round for Terra AI takes on a much bigger dimension than a simple venture capital check. Khosla Ventures, one of the most respected investment firms in Silicon Valley, has a solid track record of betting on technologies that redefine entire industries. Choosing Terra AI signals that the market already sees artificial intelligence applied to mining as one of the most promising frontiers in the next phase of the digital economy.
Along with BHP Ventures, which invested $4 million in this round, the combination of investors sends a very clear message: the industry is ready to evolve. BHP made the investment after successfully testing Terra AI’s technology on a mining project late last year, according to Mern. That kind of practical validation from an industry giant adds a layer of credibility that few early-stage startups manage to achieve.
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The mining sector moves trillions of dollars per year globally, but still largely operates with practices that haven’t changed much in decades. Geological analyses take months, exploratory drilling costs a fortune, and even then it might turn up nothing. Terra AI’s promise is precisely to cut that cycle short, using advanced predictive models to indicate, with much higher confidence, where it’s actually worth drilling. This reduces costs, speeds up decisions, and ultimately could determine who leads the supply of the resources the world will need in the decades ahead.
How Terra AI’s technology works in practice
Terra AI develops artificial intelligence models that help mining companies better map underground resources and make more informed decisions about developing their projects. The startup combines different types of data — satellite imagery, seismic analyses, historical drilling records, and geochemical information — to build three-dimensional models of the subsurface. These models can identify patterns that indicate the presence of critical minerals in regions that haven’t been explored yet or in areas where previous surveys missed them due to methodological limitations.
In practice, what the technology does is transform a process that used to rely heavily on intuition and the experience of senior geologists into something far more data-driven and with a significantly smaller margin of error. Mining companies can save money and time by using the models to better target their drilling projects, avoiding investments in locations with low return potential.
Terra AI’s algorithms continuously learn from new data, which means the more information is fed into the system, the more accurate it becomes. This creates an interesting compounding effect: companies that adopt the platform early tend to accumulate competitive advantages that grow over time, because the model keeps getting more finely calibrated to the geological specifics of the regions where they operate.
Another thing that stands out is the platform’s versatility. Beyond traditional mining, Terra AI’s models can also work with other technologies that use subsurface resources and drilling, including:
- Advanced geothermal energy — mapping underground heat sources for clean energy generation
- Carbon storage — identifying geological formations suitable for CO₂ capture and storage
This ability to operate across multiple adjacent markets significantly expands the startup’s growth potential and makes it relevant not just for mining, but for the entire energy transition ecosystem.
Terra AI can also ingest legacy data — those geological records accumulated over decades that sit in old formats or information silos. By processing this material with its models, the startup generates insights that simply weren’t possible before. That means the value of the technology isn’t just in exploring new territories, but also in reinterpreting what’s already been mapped with completely fresh eyes. 🔍
Where Terra AI came from and who’s behind it
Before this Series A, Terra AI had already raised $3.4 million in a seed round in late 2023, also led by Khosla Ventures. That round included heavyweight participants like Rio Tinto, Storyhouse Ventures, Plug and Play, the TomKat Center for Sustainability, and Climate Capital. Having Rio Tinto, another global mining giant, among the early investors was already a clear sign that the technology had real potential.
CEO John Mern co-founded Terra AI alongside Anthony Corso and Markus Zechner. Before launching the startup, Mern served as a decision science lead at KoBold Metals, another standout company in the tech-driven mining space. That prior experience at one of the most well-known startups in the sector gave Mern a deep understanding of the operational challenges and the opportunities AI can unlock in mineral exploration.
With the Series A funds, Terra AI plans to hire new talent and develop products specifically aimed at smaller mining companies, known in the industry as junior miners. These smaller companies typically don’t have access to the same tools and technical teams that the major miners do, which makes Terra AI’s offering especially attractive for this audience. Democratizing access to artificial intelligence in mineral exploration could be a massive competitive differentiator.
The bigger picture: why mining and AI are converging right now
The entry of major investors into the Terra AI ecosystem isn’t an isolated event. It’s part of a broader trend driven by three forces that are converging at the same time:
- Explosive demand for minerals — the electrification of the global economy is pushing the need for copper, lithium, and rare earths to historic levels
- Supply chain constraints — China has been restricting access to rare earth magnets, forcing other countries to seek domestic alternatives
- Low-cost AI — the falling cost of artificial intelligence technologies has allowed solutions that were previously out of reach to enter the mining sector
Copper, in particular, has been the most in-demand mineral in this new wave. It’s a fundamental ingredient in the wiring of data centers, which are expanding rapidly thanks to the generative AI boom. Terra AI itself has been prioritizing copper, according to Mern, because that’s what the market is demanding right now.
Copper and rare earth mining, specifically, have seen a significant uptick in new startups and investments. As copper demand skyrockets and China restricts access to rare earths, the search for new supply sources has become a geopolitical priority, not just a commercial one.
From an investment standpoint, the minertech segment — the term used for startups applying advanced technology to mining — is still relatively new, but it’s growing steadily. Specialized funds, major mining companies, and even governments are allocating resources to accelerate solutions that can reduce the environmental impact of extraction, increase exploration success rates, and ensure that the supply of strategic materials doesn’t become a bottleneck for the global energy transition.
What this means for Brazil
For Brazil, this scenario also carries enormous relevance. The country holds some of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, including significant deposits of niobium, lithium, and rare earths. Adopting technologies like those developed by Terra AI could radically transform how Brazil maps, extracts, and adds value to these resources.
Instead of exporting raw materials, using AI in the prospecting phase can help identify higher-quality deposits, optimize extraction, and reduce waste — creating smarter, more profitable mining with a smaller environmental footprint. In a scenario where the entire world is competing for access to these materials, countries that adopt advanced exploration tools sooner could secure a privileged position in the global value chain. 🌎
What’s next for Terra AI
With $20 million in the bank and two heavyweight strategic investors on board, Terra AI has more than enough fuel to accelerate the development of its models, expand its team of data scientists and geologists, and scale operations into new markets and regions. The startup already has contracts with operators in the sector, and the expectation is that this new round will allow it to double the platform’s processing capacity and broaden the geographic coverage of its trained models.
The partnership with BHP Ventures, in particular, opens doors for the technology to be tested and validated at real scale within the operations of one of the world’s largest mining companies. This type of validation is extremely valuable for a startup that needs to prove its models work not just in controlled environments, but in real field conditions, with all the geological, operational, and logistical complexity that entails.
In John Mern’s own words: we are at the beginning of a long-term refocusing on mining in the United States and around the world. That statement sums up the moment pretty well. The mining industry is undergoing a structural transformation, and artificial intelligence is the catalyst that could accelerate this shift on a scale we’re only beginning to grasp.
Artificial intelligence applied to mining is still in its early chapters, but the storyline is already getting very interesting. Terra AI is one of the central characters in this story, and the investment that just landed is the kind of signal the market typically uses to identify which technologies are truly going to change the game. Definitely one to keep an eye on. 👀
The race for the minerals of the future has begun, and AI is already inside the mine.
