IMARC tech stars 2025: Part 2
- 29 May 2025
Some of the world’s most exciting mining and metals technology companies are coming to IMARC 2025 in October this year. Fleet Space Technologies and newly rebadged Quartex are two companies that could fundamentally change the industry.
Fleet Space CEO and co-founder Flavia Tata Nardini this month talked about a new paradigm in terrestrial mineral exploration and connected supply chains for Earth’s clean energy future.
Craig Charlton, CEO of Quartex, spoke to me about the company’s X factor as it bids to reshape the mission-critical software landscape in not just mining but also other high-risk industries.
“Fleet Space’s focus on connecting tools like passive seismic, MT, gravity and drilling to satellites is the path to fundamentally change the rate and quality of data used in mineral exploration,” Tata Nardini says.
“As autonomous vehicles, vaccine development or reusable rockets demonstrate, real-time data inputs and machine learning drive breakthroughs that greatly extend the reach of humanity’s abilities.”
Fleet Space has forged partnerships with many of the world’s large miners and raised A$200 million of private equity funding over the past two years. It recently made its first acquisition, buying Australian hard-rock active seismic imaging leader, HiSeis. “With the addition of HiSeis to our ExoSphere platform we’re integrating passive and active seismic into a unified, AI-ready system, bringing precision and scale together like never before,” Tata Nardini says. She says the combination can make exploration smarter, delivering faster insights with a much small search footprint.
“Historically, the core geophysical toolkit used in modern mineral exploration produces fragmented, unstandardised datasets that are difficult to integrate and process into actionable insights,” Tata Nardini says.
“This led us to build Fleet Space’s vertically integrated exploration platform, ExoSphere, to enable the real-time acquisition and processing of terabytes of 3D exploration data from anywhere on Earth. In the process, we built the world’s first satellite-enabled geophones to deliver real-time 3D subsurface imaging up to 7km in depth with ambient noise tomography (ANT).
“Since then we have added gravity, MT and HVSR to our ExoSphere multi-physics portfolio.
“Now we are turning our sights on building the next generation of active seismic solutions.
“Active seismic delivers exceptionally high-resolution subsurface images by sending controlled energy pulses into the ground and measuring how they reflect off geological features. It’s a powerful tool, but traditionally, it’s slow, logistically challenging, and produces highly complex datasets, limiting its ability to scale.
“That’s why we acquired HiSeis … To integrate the power of real-time telemetry, remote data quality control and AI to a category of solutions that until now was largely constrained by highly manual workflows.
“By connecting HiSeis’ active seismic solutions to the ExoSphere platform, not only have we created the most comprehensive seismic exploration offering on the planet but also made active seismic more scalable and richer in data volume and quality.”
Tata Nardini says unlocking the full potential of active seismic depends on rethinking the hardware design from first principles.
Fleet Space is developing satellite-enabled, miniaturised active seismic hardware to make the technique scalable for modern mineral exploration. By shrinking the hardware and connecting it to Fleet Space’s satellite network, “we can create lightweight, field-deployable systems that transmit active seismic data in real-time, enabling faster decision making and significant reduction in the operational footprint of seismic campaigns”, Tata Nardini says.
“Even more transformative is how real-time active seismic will work in tandem with Fleet Space’s real-time passive seismic solutions,” she says.
“While passive seismic excels in detecting subsurface structures using ambient seismic noise – ideal for mapping structural controls across scales from district to target – active seismic enables targeted high-resolution imaging. Together, they create a powerful feedback loop. Passive seismic identifies structures and opportunity zones over large areas while active seismic homes in with precision detail at the target scale.”
Tata Nardini says Fleet Space’s proprietary multimodal AI models at the top of its ExoSphere stack are enabling customers to leverage “frontier AI models” trained on their real-time survey data to fine-tune drill targeting in the field.
“Exploration teams can iterate, adapt and act on intelligence faster – not just raw data,” she says.
“We are moving from an industry based on extraction to one built on real-time data intelligence.
“That shift will fundamentally change how we explore, how we assess risk and how we build the supply chains for Earth’s clean energy future.”
Quartex
Seasoned tech-sector executive Charlton sees the combination of Australian software companies K2fly and INX under the Quartex banner, backed by the world’s most successful tech PE firm, as a formidable one in an era of rapid change in the global regulatory technology, or RegTech, and workforce management software arenas.
Currently resources-focused – a market seen to have significant upside – Quartex is primed to expand in adjacent and new areas through both the segment-leading products developed by the business forerunners and through M&A, which owner Accel-KKR has proven rather adept at over the past two decades.
“It’s an original name,” Charlton says of the branding. “In my mind it’s very strong.
“The Quar in Quartex really plays to our four areas of major competency, being workforce management, frontline employee health and safety, governance risk and compliance and public disclosure and reporting. So that's the genesis of the name. We kept the X as well as a bit of a homage to INX.
“Our area of focus is high-risk, asset-intensive industries. That’s really where we want to play. We want to be the global leader in terms of delivering indispensable software to large and growing companies in that space … which is a lot broader than just resources and mining.
“Our plan at this point in time is to really double down on what you would call our ICP [ideal customer profile] but leave our options open because we do have customers already that aren’t in mining or resources. We certainly don’t want to close any doors.”
Silicon Valley-based Accel-KKR’s previous foray into mining software was its 2018 acquisition of Seequent and subsequent 2021 exit. New York Stock Exchange-listed Bentley Systems was the buyer and US$1.05 billion was the number. It reset the bar in mining tech M&A.
“They are the most successful private equity firm in the world because they just focus on software, and whether that software is mining or ERP or health-related they bring a tonne of expertise and also some pretty deep pockets,” Charlton says.
“Those deep pockets are important because it enables us to double down on our organic innovation but also to go and buy very complementary solutions which our customers want to get their hands on.
“Technology is moving at such an incredible pace. The work that we're doing on AI now, for instance, is significantly different to what it was 12 months ago when Accell-KKR first invested. They’ve got so much inbuilt expertise within their consulting team that we can leverage and deploy … really on three different levels.
“One is to dramatically improve our own productivity so that we’re developing solutions in a far more productive way [and] getting more bang for our buck for the benefit of our customers.
“Number two is incorporating AI into our core solutions. That's going to move at pace.
“And then there’s agentic AI, where we can automate customer workflows so they become far more efficient.
“That’s just AI. But there’s so many things that are happening from a tech perspective that being with the best in the business, Accel-KKR, gives us an enormous head start in my mind.”
Technology is a precious commodity today in mining and IMARC 2025 will give visitors, including many operators, a rich sample of what the international tech community currently has to offer. This article is part of an exclusive series on this year’s tech exhibitors and sponsors.
