IMARC pitch battle winner is bug plug and play
- 27 October 2025
Endolith CEO Liz Dennett laughed when she heard her company’s copper-mining microbes called “Alaskan bugs you would love to take to a gun fight”. But after winning the IMARC 2025 Innovation Pitch Battle she might find herself reciting the tagline in future.
The American astrobiologist came to Sydney and took on a crack local batch of start-ups after honing her pitch with about 120 VCs over the past few months, emerging on top in the eyes of the judges.
“Liz, you had me at genomic sequencing,” said one of them, experienced mining business and technical leader, Caoilin Chestnutt.
Also judging the Shark Tank-like line-up of promising new mining tech start-ups were veteran mining technologist and Global Mining Guidelines Group counsellor Andrew Scott and Rob Adamson, RFC Ambrian executive chair and tech investment guru.
In the proverbial tank were founders and leaders of Bioculum, Banksia Minerals Processing, Ecohoist, RapidGraphite and Endolith which, for the uninitiated, means rock organism or bacterium.
They were picked from an IMARC Innovation & Investment Zone overflowing with outstanding tech minnows.
Dennett compared Endolith’s super bugs with a stray dog her family adopted during her childhood in Alaska. “That brown mutt could thrive in any conditions because it grew up pretty much on the streets of Alaska. And that’s what these bugs are. These aren’t really domesticated organisms that need fastidious nutrients.
“We use microbial communities – many hands make light work – so it’s not us sending in acidus peribacillus ferredoxins like some people. Our communities have somewhere between six and 20 different microbes. A lot of times they have redundancy. They are completely robust.
“We grow our microbes on site. We use continuous low-dose inoculation. And then we use real-time genomic monitoring. We love to work with your really challenging ore types but as your orebodies change we augment the microbes. As temperature changes, Eh changes, pH changes, all of that: we’ve got microbes for that.”
As impressive as all the bug talk was Endolith’s business model. It connects its biohatcheries to existing heap leach infrastructure after analysing the genomic make-up of a customer’s ore and tailoring biolixiviants to suit. Then it uses its software to monitor and adjust solutions, where needed, to optimise recovery rates.
“I lead with the fact we’re using microbes but really it’s biological intelligence,” Dennett said.
“What that means is we’re using microbial communities that we’ve adapted through some really unique techniques and we're combining that with a cloud-native platform and intelligence.
“These are three technologies that make a Venn diagram that could really only exist in 2025.
“Mining is the last industry to get this biological intelligence layer. You've got your SCADA systems, you have some different process controls for solvent extraction, electro-winning, and now is the time where those circles become that overlap in the Venn diagram and we can really plug microbes into the equation.
“At our core, we're a platform play. Every data point we touch, every time we run microbes within the ore and bring the data together, our algorithms get smarter. We’re able to use technologies like AI, like data science, like machine learning, so that these microbes are able to drive the changes. And you're able to turn these heap leaches from a black box into something that you can really instrument.
“The best part is it’s complementary to everything you are doing. If you are using internal chemical approaches, if you're partnered with third parties, like some of the great start-ups out there that have different approaches, we provide the biological intelligence layer that makes sense of all of that data, and we serve it up to you in a platform so you can see what is happening from your cell phone at any time.”
Endolith is hoping to wrap up a series A funding round soon after raising circa-US$5 million in a seed round last year. It is focused mainly on the copper space at the moment, working with the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto and South32, but also has exposure to lithium.
“There are so many applications,” Dennett said. “I always tell the team, as someone who gets distracted by all these great ideas, cash is king; we don't own our money. Focus is queen. And we'll earn the right to be a platform.
“I think it's a little arrogant as a seed stage company to be like, we’re going to be a platform and do all these things when we haven’t commercialised one. We do have a JDA [joint development agreement] with Arizona lithium. We’ve done significant testing on both lithium clays and some DLE [direct lithium extraction] work, and we're continuing to expand there.”
