Fleet Space Technologies, has announced a $150 million funding round that will be used to expand the capabilities of the company’s global exploration platform, ExoSphere, to accelerate the discovery of critical minerals needed for Earth’s clean energy future.
The funding round was Led by Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) and joined by existing investors Blackbird Ventures, Hostplus, Horizons Ventures, Artesian Venture Partners, and Alumni Ventures.
“The ability to meet the rapidly increasing demand for critical minerals presents a significant challenge to achieving global net-zero targets,” said senior managing director, Teachers’ Venture Growth, Rick Prostko.
“Current mineral exploration methods are inadequate for efficient discovery and production. Fleet Space addresses this with advanced 3D subsurface imaging and AI analysis tools, which have the potential to sustainably transform the industry. We are proud to support the multidisciplinary team at Fleet Space in their efforts to accelerate the global energy transition.”
Niki Scevak, Partner at Blackbird, said the company is proud to continue its investment Fleet Space.
“Quite simply, the discovery of critical minerals must exponentially increase if we are to electrify our society by 2050 and breakthroughs, like ExoSphere, are needed to make it happen,” he said.
Founded by former propulsion engineer at the European Space Agency, Flavia Tata Nardini, and aerospace entrepreneur, Matt Pearson, Fleet Space was created to harness the capabilities of space exploration technologies for a new wave of solutions that can accelerate decarbonisation and the global energy transition.
By integrating Fleet Space’s satellites in LEO, smart seismic sensors, and AI into an end-to-end solution, Fleet Space’s ExoSphere technology streamlines the acquisition, processing, and integration of exploration datasets.
This has the potential to provide the global mining industry with high-quality targeting insights faster than ever before while minimising environmental impact.
“There are two versions of the future. One where we bend the latest advances in space, AI, and big data towards building a clean energy future and another where we risk net-zero targets falling out of reach as the rate of new discoveries of energy transition minerals continues to decline,” added CEO & Co-Founder of Fleet Space, Flavia Tata Nardini.
“With ExoSphere, we have combined these technologies into an end-to-end platform that seamlessly integrates with and compliments modern mining operations – making the frontier of exploration technology accessible to the global mining industry within a single workflow. This is a fundamental step to unlock humanity’s potential for making extraordinary discoveries with less environmental impact.”
Exponential Growth
Today’s announcement caps a period of exponential growth for Fleet Space. In the past year, Fleet Space has:
– Expanded the company’s global footprint to the US, Canada, Chile, and Luxembourg with 130+ employees worldwide to support the deployment of ExoSphere for over 40+ industry leading exploration companies across five continents.
– Deployed ExoSphere to accelerate exploration in some of the most prospective areas on Earth with industry leaders like Rio Tinto and Barrick Gold- while also delivering the world’s largest real-time 3D imaging survey in Australia’s Macquarie Arc and the world’s highest real-time 3D imaging survey in Chile’s Atacama region.
– Launched ExoSphere Discovery, Fleet Space’s breakthrough AI-powered exploration technology which uses proprietary multimodal AI models to predict opportunity zones and targets with potential mineralisation – a pioneering advance for the use of AI in mineral exploration met with widespread demand in the industry.