Mineflow

Hey YC! I'm Ryan from Mineflow.

Quick backstory: I've always been fascinated by how mining companies discover deposits. That passion led me to leave Google after two years of working on deep learning for ads to start Mineflow. I’m convinced that mineral exploration is as much a statistics problem as it is a geology problem, and early feedback from lithium mining companies suggests I might be on the right track!

The problem

Accurately predicting deposit shapes is critical for geologists because each drill hole can cost tens of thousands of dollars. However, traditional computational models fall short because they:

1. Can't incorporate highly multimodal data
2. Don’t learn from data across multiple exploration sites
3. Rely on naive algorithms for their inferences

As a result, mining companies often drill thousands of holes before an exploration site becomes operational, driving up costs.

The solution

Mineflow lets geologists upload any dataset from their exploration sites. Then, Mineflow builds a custom AI model to predict the shape and location of mineral deposits. By training a deep learning model on the whole dataset, Mineflow is able to make predictions with an order of magnitude of accuracy more than our competitors. As a result, Mineflow can significantly reduce the number of drill holes needed, saving mining companies millions in exploration costs.

We can produce predictions in 2 dimensions (think overhead, bird' s-eye view) and 3 dimensions (think 3D grid of cubes).

3D gold deposit we are modeling:

2D prospectivity map we produced for an exploration project:

Team

Ryan earned a BS in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon SCS and built ML models for the Google Display Ads optimization team for two years. While at Google, he launched products and deep learning models that generated ~$125m USD of ARR.

Ask

If you know anyone in mineral exploration or oil and gas exploration, I'd love to connect with them to see how Mineflow can help. Grab space on my calendar here.