Last year Indian mining conglomerate, the Vimson Group, and New York City innovation hub, New Lab partnered to create Prospect Mining Studio, a venture studio program to address the biggest challenges facing the mining sector.
Prospect Mining Studio’s focus is on enhancing sustainability and closed-loop production, environmental sensing, worker performance and safety, mineral extraction and energy efficiency, and data optimization.
Each 12-month program cycle brings together startups, entrepreneurs, mining industry experts, venture partners and leading academics from across the globe to define challenges, prototype rapidly, and implement pilots at mining sites, all while building efficiencies, measuring impact and disrupting the status quo.
The 15 startups for the 2020 cohort have been announced and four Canadian companies were selected – Calgary’s Carbon Upcycling Technologies, Toronto’s Novamera, Sudbury’s Objectivity, and B.C.’s own LlamaZOO.
Victoria’s LlamaZOO uses 3D visualization to help major industries, such as mining, make better decisions from complex spatial data.
LlamaZOO is able to combine spatial data sets such as LiDAR, satellite, CAD, IoT, and GIS into one unified view and to provide analytic and visualization tools that generate business insights specifically tailored to the layout of large industrial sites and infrastructure.
Earlier this year LlamaZOO added three new board members, Hannes Blum, Venture Partner at Acton Capital Partners, Jeff Booth, former CEO of BuildDirect, and Edoardo De Martin, General Manager of Microsoft Vancouver.
The 2020 cohort will now have remote access to New Lab’s community, network, prototyping facilities and workspaces (pictured) as well as a cohort of mining experts. The startups meeting the necessary milestones will pilot and validate their technologies at Vimson or partner mining sites.