Open Mineral, has raised $33 million led by Mubadala Investment Company to accelerate growth of its global digital trade platform for base metal commodities . Existing investors Xploration Capital and Emerald Technology Ventures were joined by new investors Statkraft Ventures and Lingfeng Capital in the Series C round. Open Mineral will use the capital to continue to accelerate its growth, solidify its physical supply chain merchant activities, and advance its leading position in digitizing metal raw material trading.
The metal raw commodities market is a $200 billion space, with most of its participants still trading via paper documents.
Open Mineral’s platform has registered over 900 metals and mining companies across the world. The company has developed proprietary pricing algorithms to drive broader value creation through the commodity supply chain.
Open Mineral is actively working with third-party providers to incorporate ESG metrics across the sell-side (supplier product offers) and buy-side (downstream processing) and developing the architecture to facilitate concentrate swaps in the prevailing costly freight environment. The company has also developed automated blending/smelter material optimization solutions enabling more efficient, informed, and profitable trade of physical metal raw commodities. These steps are crucial in supporting the metal and mining industries’ ambition of transitioning to a lower carbon world and provide an additional lever/certification for the transparency and footprint of the trade.
“The metal trading industry’s future is in digital data and analytics enabling market participants to communicate faster and make quicker, and more data-driven decisions”, said Boris Eykher, CEO & Co-Founder of Open Mineral. “Just as eBay revolutionized retail purchasing by bringing more choices to buyers and sellers, we aim to do the same for physical commodity producers in a curated, trusted environment of the Open Mineral platform. Our goal is to give end-to-end service, more information, transparency, and fair market terms to miners and smelters so they can make better decisions and ultimately become more profitable.”
Open Mineral was recognized for its innovation at the 2018 #DisruptMining and has since been awarded the 2019 #WEF Technology Pioneer and 2020 Rising Star Company by S&P Global Platts Global Metals for its work and potential to transform the trade of minerals and improve society for years to come.
“We backed Ilya and Boris as first institutional money and we couldn’t be happier with our investment. The team has constantly delivered and managed to build both a profitable and fast growing business. A new investment led by Mubadala is a stamp of approval that will open new opportunities for Open Mineral both in terms of new business as well as trade financing, which is crucial to Open Mineral’s clients”, said Igor Kim, Managing Partner at Xploration Capital. “We look forward to working closely with founders, Emerald Ventures, Mubadala, Lingfeng, and Statkraft Ventures to accelerate the company’s growth and deliver even more value to Open Mineral’s clients.”
Faris Al Mazrui, Head of Russia and CIS Investments at Mubadala, said: “Open Mineral is disrupting the commodity trading business by leveraging data analytics technology. Buyers and sellers of base metal commodities can tap into a unique and proprietary data hub to trade more efficiently and capture upside. Mubadala has been investing in technology for more than a decade; we see strong potential in Open Mineral and are keen to support its growth and evolution.”
Alexander Küppers, Managing Director at Statkraft Ventures, explains the reason for investing in Open Mineral: “We trust Open Mineral has built a scalable, global platform for trading metal raw materials. We consider metal raw materials being the fundamental resource supporting the energy transition as well as powering the lithium-ion “battery rise”.
Ming Shu, Partner at Lingfeng Capital, adds: “We support Open Mineral first and foremost for the visionary and persistent founders and the increasingly deep bench of first-class executives. The Company has demonstrated high efficiency in gaining traction and the potential to create tremendous value through the digital transformation of the traditional metals and mining value chain, which carries strategic importance to the global economy. As an Asia-based investor, we look forward to adding value in the key growth market of Open Mineral.”
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