Search results signal strong growth outlook for VerAI
- 3 December 2024
The next 12 months shape as a defining period for AI-led mineral discovery and project generation and Matt Grainger thinks VerAI is going to be in the thick of the action.
“Based on the validation we've had with our technology this year we expect to be doing more deals, going to more jurisdictions, making more discoveries and really dramatically growing the business in 2025,” said the US-headquartered company’s vice president, value creation and portfolio management, at the Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 conference in London.
London-based Grainger, a veteran geologist and company manager, took on the full-time role in September after more than a year working as an advisor to VerAI.
No stranger to project generation and royalty-based mining company models, he is traversing the globe and key industry forums such as Resourcing Tomorrow looking to build VerAI’s exposure to quality exploration ground and partners. He says the industry’s appetite for alternative avenues to faster and cheaper discoveries is peaking. The value of the technology, having been demonstrated in the pharmaceutical, medical and other fields, is widely recognised.
A confluence of factors is now putting a deluge of geophysical and other search data into machine learning models that are starting to live up to hype about their potential to reset discovery odds and maybe also the sector’s appeal to a new generation of geoscientists.
VerAI says it wants to materially change the industry’s standard one-in-1000 average rate of turning exploration projects into mines with a platform that is “100 times more accurate, 20 times faster and 20 times cheaper”. Its technology could “shrink the traditional targeting window from three or four years to two months” while helping users de-risk decision making.
“I’ve been in the exploration space for 25 years and have been through all of the cycles and all the realities of the market and I understand the increasing frustration in our ability, or inability, to make new discoveries,” Grainger said.
“The industry has been really struggling in terms of the way it’s been doing things and that’s reflected to some extent in its ability to raise capital. Investors are looking elsewhere because they consider the returns to be poor. I’ve spoken to many people in the industry who recognise that we need something to change in all of this and that's where technology is going to come in.
“The availability of people is becoming a real problem now, too. You need to have high quality people to make discoveries and higher success rates and the ability to use modern technology to provide better insight and guidance is going to be a factor in attracting and retaining those people.”
Grainger said VerAI was busy in North and South America, working on a range of commodities.
The trend highlighted at events such as Resourcing Tomorrow of mining and exploration companies returning to mature jurisdictions to invest due to geopolitics and other factors would only extend the industry’s focus on deeper exploration and geophysics.
“A logical extension of that is you will use AI with that data to generate targets,” Grainger said.
“The issue you have with geophysics is that there’s typically bias in the data collection and selection.
“Our technology is a lot more objective. It’s looking for a specific signal that it associates with economic mineralisation that it can apply in new areas.
“Notwithstanding advances in computing power and AI this sort of data didn’t exist 30 years ago, so it’s definitely of its time both in terms of the data processing capacity and the availability of data.”
Rare earth elements (REE) explorer US Critical Materials Corp said this month its strategic partnership with VerAI continued to produce promising results at Sheep Creek in Montana, USA.
“Using our geophysical data and high-grade rare earth element targets on a portion of the property, VerAI has successfully identified multiple drill-ready targets on adjacent land with similar characteristics,” US Critical Materials president James Hedrick said.
“From our initial evaluation of these targets we have high confidence in their potential to host significant high-grade REE mineralisation and further confirms our project as a future key strategic supplier of REEs including high levels of neodymium and praseodymium, and critical minerals including scandium, gallium, strontium, niobium, and yttrium.”
VerAI technology was trained on US Critical Materials geophysical data and previous discoveries on about 800 acres of the property before being unleashed on circa-5900 acres of untested claims. The explorer said the new analysis showed “a number of additional drill ready sites with similar characteristics as the original training locations, indicating further evidence of the possibility of a continuous source of carbonatite material at depth throughout the entire 6700 acres and 335 claims that make up our Sheep Creek holdings”.
US Critical Materials wants to be drilling the targets by the third quarter next year.
Grainger said the case study was typical of a number of VerAI technical validation milestones that were also expanding its royalty portfolio.
“This year we’ve seen a fairly major uptick in terms of that portfolio of projects that we have,” he said.
“That’s been built on a platform that has been very successful at helping to find these concealed critical mineral deposits.
“Project scale targets enable our partners to rapidly drill test high probability targets that we are providing.
“Because the model is all about leveraging the partners that we're working with, we have the advantage that we can maintain a lean, dynamic team.
“In 2025 we want to accelerate and grow these successful partnerships.
“We will be looking to grow further opportunities where we can work with advanced-stage and potentially producing assets where their issue may be that they've got declining reserves and they have to prioritise finding near-mine deposits.
“Our technology works just as well in those environments.
“We’ll accelerate our efforts to generate these partnerships, which obviously then potentially become valuable quickly from a royalty standpoint.
“We expect to see a step change in the value of our portfolio as we accelerate our activity and deal execution.”
