Mining Tech Startup Landscape 2026 Report

A 17-page market report on 170 private technology startups across the mining and metals value chain (exploration, extraction, processing and refining, recovery from mine waste, and mine operations) in 26 countries. It finds that disclosed venture funding (~$6.4B) is concentrated in a few US companies: five startups hold 44% and US startups 71%. San Francisco Bay Area startups have raised $2.1B, against $80M for Santiago and Perth combined, and Latin America receives 0.9% of funding despite Chile and Peru mining 35% of the world’s copper. Miners (Rio Tinto, BHP Ventures) are the most active investors. The report also sets out the copper supply gap to 2040, the reasons new supply is slow, and why refining is concentrated in China. Every figure links to its source. 

The underlying dataset and code are open at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23928137.