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Investing in VerAI and the Global Zero-Carbon Transformation

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By Adrian Vanzyl, Director, and Jacob Katz, Senior Associate at Blumberg Capital

We are proud to announce our investment in VerAI and its mission to accelerate the global zero-carbon transformation. VerAI aims to discover the minerals essential for our sustainable future by developing an AI platform to detect concealed mineral deposits in vast unexplored areas of covered terrain. Co-founders Yair Frastai and Amitai Axelrod, experienced leaders in the Israeli intelligence and mineral exploration industry, have set out to use a sophisticated AI platform to dramatically improve mineral discovery success rates and transform the future of mining.

Our team is excited about the opportunity to make an impact with Yair, Amitai and the growing VerAI team. Among the reasons:

  • A cross-industry opportunity to enable a greener future and support growing demand from metal-intensive sectors like electric vehicles
  • Transformation of mining into MiningTech – a timely AI use case consistent with our investment thesis and portfolio successes
  • Experienced founding team with deep experience solving complex problems, developing innovative technology and mineral discovery
  • The potential to increase the mineral discovery success rate from ~1:1000 to ~1:10
  • An operational AI Targeting Platform that is already generating value with industry partners

Beyond the founding team, VerAI has support from leading professors from MIT and Duke University in the U.S. and Imperial College in the UK, as well as from top industry experts. We saw a clear opportunity to serve as an extended part of the team and connect VerAI with our global network of potential partners and technology leaders to accelerate growth.

The VerAI Opportunity

The world is headed toward a metals supply gap as global demand for metals is expected to double in the next two decades. Growing industries like electric vehicles are accelerating the demand as electric cars require nearly four times more copper than conventional cars, and multiple critical metals for the electronics and battery technology.

Meanwhile, the mineral exploration industry is underperforming. Traditional discovery methods are ineffective, inefficient and no longer viable economically, exacerbating the need for radical innovation. We believe VerAI will help shape the future of MiningTech as a leader in AI-powered mineral discovery.

The technology that VerAI is developing not only aims to improve the discovery success rate from ~1:1000 to ~1:10 but also skips the costly and time-consuming process of Area Reduction (which can take between 1-3 years). VerAI’s sophisticated AI models trace signatures of existing economic mineral deposits by extracting unique insights from complex spatial datasets, which are used to predict the location of new concealed deposits in covered areas. This innovative ability to process and exploit signatures of economic mineral deposits in the raw data will more accurately uncover rewarding mineral deposits at a much higher rate than current solutions.

Under the leadership of Yair and Amitai, who bring unique and relevant backgrounds to the problem at hand, VerAI has an exciting journey ahead. We are proud to join VerAI’s journey as a board member and long-term partner – and lead the company’s Seed round in partnership with Chrysalix.

Through our investment, VerAI joins Blumberg Capital’s community of visionary founders and transformative, AI-driven software companies.

Please follow Yair, Amitai and the VerAI team here and on LinkedIn.

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