Our Vision
Our vision is to fundamentally change how exploration is done and turn it into a repeatable science because the industry standard approach will not be able produce the materials we need for our future economy. This means overhauling everything about the current process—from what data we collect, how it’s stored and analyzed, to the models and technology we deploy and how we work together. We make better decisions that lead to higher quality discoveries, faster, by combining cutting-edge AI and scientific computing with the human intelligence of our world-class experts.
Founder Story
KoBold Metals was founded in 2018 by Kurt House, Josh Goldman, and Jeff Jurinak to help address the growing supply gap of critical minerals needed to build our future economy. They saw how slow the discovery process was—with scattered data, bespoke analyses, siloed teams, and outdated methods, the number of discoveries per dollar invested was only getting worse. The world was moving toward electrification, but the industry’s decades-old approach using fragmented data, bespoke analyses, siloed expertise, and outdated methods, could not be relied on to find enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to meet the growing demand.
They were ambitious. They recognized that to change how exploration is done, they needed to change the incentives: technology couldn’t be developed on its own, it needed to be proven on actual exploration projects and produce results; technologists needed to become explorers to create the best hardware and software; to motivate and reward innovation, KoBold needed to develop and deploy its own systems. And above all, we needed to apply a rigorously scientific approach to decision-making where we use AI judiciously, ultimately driven by human intelligence, to generate high-quality, testable hypotheses. As a result, KoBold became not just a technology company, but a full stack, scientific exploration company that eventually expanded to encompass mine development after the Mingomba discovery.
