There is a new one sheriff in the city. KoBold Metals, a company that uses AI to monitor the earth and find the rare metals used to make electric cars around the world, achieved unicorn status this week, meaning that in the eyes of investors , It is already worth more than 1,000 million euros.
It has achieved this after raising a round of 200 million dollars, 183 million euros, of which has echoed first he Wall Street Journal.
But the good news for KoBold has not ended here. Nothing more and nothing less than Breakthrough Energy Ventures has participated in this.
It is a venture capital fund specializing in clean energy that has the backing of billionaires such as Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, among many others.
The company, therefore, Today it attracts the attention of many of the most outstanding businessmen of the last decades.
Other investors who have wanted their share in Kobold’s business have been the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, specializing in new technologies, and Bond Capital.
The latter firm has been co-founded by Mary Meeker, a veteran investor known for spotting big trends early and whose annual report on Internet trends is one of the most anticipated among technology investors.
With this round, which surpasses another of 192.5 million dollars from February 2022 (176.11 million euros), Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Bond underline their firm commitment to KoBold technology.
Founded in 2018, the startup uses machine learning to search for deposits of rare metals that are otherwise crucial for building batteries for electric vehicles. Especially critical in this regard lithium, nickel, cobalt and copperre.
The company, as explained in its Webhas more than 60 projects on three continents and invests in them approximately 100 million dollars annually.
The company also has a large research and development budget dedicated to the use of Artificial Intelligence to model the earth’s subsoil and explore depths beyond the reach of more conventional techniques.
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“Our proprietary artificial intelligence tools are based on a concept we call efficiency of information (EOI). This allows KoBold to determine what data to collect at each step of the exploration to minimize uncertainty,” the company explains on its website. .
Among his projects, for example, the alliance that KoBold sealed in 2021 with BHP to explore land in Australia stands out.
As he then told Business Insider the CEO of the company, Kurt House, one of the main beneficiaries of the agreement, signed until 2024, could be, for example, Tesla, which is looking and wanting to supply itself with the nickel with which its electric batteries are built.
Regarding the ethical implications of these projects, which involve, for example, the exploration of countries like Zambia, the CEO of the company is clear about KoBold’s mission: “Basically, we can guarantee that any discovery we make there be conducted in an ethically and environmentally sound manner“, he assured Business Insider.
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KoBold, backed by billionaires like Gates, Bezos and Jack Ma, is Silicon Valley’s new darling and achieves unicorn status