IQT Explains: What's So Critical About Critical Minerals (ft. Atomionics)

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[music] [music] [music] Welcome to IQT explains a series on IQT podcast where we explore technology trends and their impact on national security to provide insights and unique perspectives. I'm your host John Chape and today we're exploring critical minerals. Let's think for a second if you had um an iPhone, uh any smartphone, the need for a CAT scan or MRI, um our national defense and the systems they depend upon, radar, satellites, uh all of these actually share a commonality. They all depend upon critical minerals. It's an interesting topic because we're thinking a lot about strategic industrialization these days and the concept that we need to have secure and resilient supply chains for these about $4 trillion of the US economy is actually based upon different systems and goods that require critical minerals in the products that we create and use every day.

So unpacking this and trying to understand what a critical mineral is though goes way beyond my ability. Um so I've brought in two experts to help today. one to my side, Russ Ross, VP of technology at IQT, um a technology architect and a a physicist by background, I believe, too. >> That's right. >> Um Sahil Tapiwala, the CEO of Adamionics, um an IQT portfolio company that is focused on areas of critical mineral discovery, and we want to learn more about what they're working on, including the land of quantum sensing.

So, we're going to have a lot to unpack. Let me start for a moment with Russ. So about 54 uh uh critical minerals defined in the latest draft from US government in terms of what we recognize. How can there be 54? What what are critical minerals? >> Yeah, that's a good question and a lot of people are thinking about it, John. Um and where we where we actually start to define what a critical mineral is is is that it has a criticality to our economy, right? What are those things? What are those goods that are being sold? And then what are the materials that are used in the manufacturing of those goods.

Um and and not just that but uh you know if there is a critical element that enables a product to work or man or or or or perform in a certain way. Um and we start to start to look at like okay not just consumer goods right as you said earlier the phones um uh micro electronics all of those but also defense goods um things that are used in radar and and other uh night vision systems. And so we start to look at those supply chains further and further upstream and the the actual elements that enable that electronic process to to to work or an optical process. Those are what are critical to the technology. >> So we mentioned a smartphone before.

We all have one of these. Um, I think it's about five or six rare earth elements are also involved in either inside in the production of a smartphone or even the glass that we think of that's so nice and polished and we're able to use touch upon it. There are rare earths involved with actually the polishing of that glass so it comes out the way that we're used to. What's a rare earth then? Is that different than critical minerals or the same? No, no, it it they are they are a set of uh of elements within the critical minerals uh landscape, right? There's there's about uh I think it's on the teens of these things that are called rare earths. Um they actually are heavier elements that have a um an orbital structure.

uh we won't get into that uh too too much but it it allows them to act in a very particular way in electronics and as as well as in uh in structural um materials. It just it enables a whole different um set of properties for materials that we use in everyday. So the the the rare earth that goes into the the polishing um it it stands up to that that aggressive um lapping against the screen right and and is able to wear down the glass. >> So special strength um special properties like magnetics you know strong magnetics specifications of sensors etc all available. Sahil, you know, you once told me, I think as we got to know each other, that a a book uh inspired you to try to, you know, move into this industry.

Not everyone decides that they want to have a career path initially in the mineral or in the resource industry. How did you get drawn in? >> Yeah, that's a great question. It was a meandering path and uh maybe I'll backtrack a bit as to you know, how I even got involved in adionics. uh before at minix I trained as a chemist and an electronics engineer and my world was one of robotics and multimaterial 3D printing I was fascinated by materials at the same time was deeply interested in robotic systems but uh one fine day uh as I was reading this book called the new map by Daniel Jurgen it spoke about the amount of metal that we actually need over the next 10 to 20 ers uh as we move towards an energy mix an energy mix that includes solar wind as well as conventional energy sources but beyond that even for electric vehicles as well as the data centers that we are looking to build as AI factories all of these require 500% more minerals to enable that these minerals are going to form the bedrock of the infrastructure that needs to be built um over the next 10 to 20 years for example we need as much copper in the next uh 10 years as we did in the last 120. Now these are some exorbitant numbers and the key challenge that we realized was that resource exploration is based on trial and error and majority of this massive delta between demand as well as the supply that we have right now means that we need to find new deposits of minerals as well.

But uh 90% of the drills that we do are empty and they're in the wrong place. And that's why it takes decades to discover a deposit. And this was the problem that we set out to solve at atom ionics. And this is actually what got me excited uh about the whole domain of uh geology as well as like resource exploration. >> Wow.

great background in in terms of um uh where we find those resources you know feed stocks as I think is is called in the trade um you know certain rare earths very specific ones aren't available in the US but we seek it amongst us and our allies we also have those that we might consider adversaries like China that are actually you know um uh deep into control of parts of either the control of feed stock or the control of the uh processing or refining to metalization of a lot of these different uh elements how about in the Do we have active deposits? Do we have the um opportunity to perhaps find more in the US? What's Adamics going to be able to do to help us in terms of identifying these these resources? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And just to set the background context for you know what's happening right now in the world um as we were just discussing 93% of the output for these minerals is controlled by you know just one country uh China. Now for any form of resilient supply chain this is actually uh extremely counterproductive which essentially means that even though the production of these minerals or like extraction is not happening in that country the feed stock that is coming from all around the world still ends up in one place. Now if we need to have a resilient supply chain, the first thing that we need to do is actually find also new deposits while at the same time building out our processing and refining capabilities as well. And and this is essentially the area that Atomics is targeting.

How do we ensure that we actually break this hold that one country has on all the feed stock that is available out there at A atomionics? Um we are building a planetary map of resources starting with certain regions where we can help pinpoint and estimate mineral resources. We focus on critical minerals um for example copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, zinc um etc. which are going to essentially be the dominant sources in the next few years. Now, interestingly, one thing that we do not realize is that in the in the United States, Arizona, Wyoming, Nevada have been some of the biggest producers of copper, nickel, and a few other deposits. Uh, in fact, until until the 1950s, we had some of the world's biggest copper mines here in Arizona.

Um and and and the United States has a culture and a background in mineral exploration as well as in mining. At Atom Iionics, what we want to do is map out large areas of land rapidly so that we can compress the time frame that it takes to go from a piece of land to an actual deposit. And so for context, one of the key things that we have, we have a two-pronged approach to essentially look for these minerals. On one hand, we have built a new way to sense the world around us better. These are called as quantum sensors or quantum gravimeters that help measure gravity.

Why is gravity interesting? Because minerals are heavier than the surrounding soil. They show up as anomalies on the gravitational field. These quantum gravimeters can produce 10,000 times better uh gravity data sets. This gravity is then analyzed by our by our AI model which we call as a large planet model to create a 3D map of the earth's crust that helps pinpoint estimate as well as identify the grade of the resource present underground. We've managed to squeeze an atomic physics lab into a basketball-sized sensor.

>> Boy, we are lucky to have a chemist and a physicist and background to help us try to understand this because now we're talking about quantum, critical minerals, rare earths, a pretty broad landscape. Russ, how with such a broad landscape do we think about investing in the space? How do we think about where we want to select ventures and build? How long has incitel been looking at this and building a practice around critical minerals? Yeah, we've been looking at this for a while now. Um, I believe our first investment was probably about 2020. Uh, it a lot of this critical minerals, a lot of the supply chain uh pitches that we're hearing from from entrepreneurs in the startup community. Uh, you know, it it would really it really started to flow right postcoid, right, post pandemic.

Um a lot of folks eyes were drawn to the supply chain challenges that we had uh during that time and then we started to look at well where else is the US well frankly pinched on supply chain and so we started to started to see a lot of that but really our investing at Inutel even started before our first critical minerals investment because we we were actually looking into battery supply chain for more than a decade now and and placing investments there and and we had seen where there were troubles in getting cobalt and other nickel and all of these other materials that are so intrinsically needed for battery chemistries and and and the like. And so we we started down that thread and and slowly started to make our way into rare earths and others uh as they became a little bit more in vogue. Yeah. And Sil alluded to the idea that you know batteries are important and rely upon critical minerals as well. Batteries we think of in our everyday devices.

We also think of it in terms of the race to be able to create the greatest AI functionality you know in the world that can also help to increase our economy. Um data centers require having battery as part of their energy infrastructure in order to have continuous power in order to have efficient power as well. When we think about China then in the turn to it where again China's quite uh dominant in the world in battery production. I used the word adversary before. China's a trading partner but in this particular area there's some things recently acting like an adversary.

And that means I'm I'm trying to uh shine a light on you know the um uh recent pronouncements to first control and then later restrict the export of both the technologies that produce um critical minerals. those things not just in the in the feed stocks themselves as part of it but also in the separation refining the metalization the ability to create the elements in the fin finished form in applications that we look at too even in the magnet production has expanded to control all of that that has a real serious repercussion to our economy to the resiliency of the supply chain how do how do we think about China where it has the dominant position in the different landscape of of critical minerals >> well it's fairly complex right um you know a lot of these A lot of these industries that are materials industries are very capital intensive. Um you know require a lot of labor. And so we saw you know a a definite shift probably post 80s where a lot of these companies where we had um we had feed stocks here in the US, we had processing here in the US, we started to see that move overseas um towards economies with cheaper labor um maybe a little bit less regulation or an ability to turn a blind eye to some of the environmental effects for some of these costic processes. And so, you know, it it actually it it's it's very uh large and expansive as to all the different feed stocks that are being processed now in China that they have control over.

And then those supply chains that they're starting to build up across the world where they're, you know, reaching out into to other countries, setting up relationships, trade relationships, ports, things of that nature. And so that actually is the pinch point for for us as we start to think about well in a world where we aren't as good a trade partner because that's the way it's looking right now with uh with a lot of the restrictions China's put either in the battery industry around the processing or frankly those things that are directed towards critical minerals um you know processing of lithium processing of rare earth minerals um you know they're they're moving slowly and surely up the supply chain. And what that's forcing a lot of the industry in the US to do is they they're having to hunker down in China and maybe even do system assembly in China, which it just pulls more of industry away from from the US. And so we need to I think we need to to to think about that a little bit more broadly. Um you know, how do we set that up? How do we make sure that, you know, the the public private partnerships that we're seeing here are are going to put the put the capital in place um and put those put a lot of the processing here in the United States.

Um it takes a long time and I think Sahil you you know this a bit better than I do. It takes a long time to set up a mind, but we do have resources here in the US that we can start to to really try to leverage and and think a little bit more broadly about, okay, what are the supply chains that we we intrinsically need here? And then what are those supply chains that we can partner with allies around ones that aren't going to set in, you know, restrictions. So there's a there's a new battleground in essence being fought around strategic industrialization because the control of these resources from a feed stock level and forward and we talked about how many of them there are as well um has a great dependency across the economy. How do we then think of a technology architecture? What's our approach to think of where we want to focus in the investment landscape in this space? Yeah, that that's a good question and there I would agree that there is a bit of economic warfare going on right now. Um that's true.

Uh so as we start to think or as I start to think about um how do we lay the groundwork so that we're organized and we understand what parts need attention um and and where where do startups actually you know uh uh focus. So uh with Sahill's technology really thinking about exploration where where are those next innovations um in exploration technologies to find where the minerals are in the ground right um now we've we've spoken a little bit about you know the the time to mine right and you know it you can't just go out and dig a hole it it takes you know multiple years at this point a lot of um a lot of prep work a lot regulation and and application, but there are mining technologies and and a push into automation. So, we got to get the stuff out of the ground. We've got [snorts] to extract the good material and then we got to separate it, right? We got to we got to turn it into either turn it into an oxide or or separate that oxide from all the dirt, frankly. Um, and with rare rare earth minerals, right, the the reason why they're called rare earths is, you know, they're they're not truly rare.

They're just in they're just in limited quantity. They're they're spread out in the earth's crust, but they're they're, you know, very very small amounts. So, you know, you have a lot of dirt to separate. Um, then after that separation process, we like to think about well, metallization is a way you refer to it. I I think about it more in the the lines of refining because there's there's a lot of different critical minerals that maybe don't turn into a metal, right? Like Yeah.

Um graphite, I mean, there's certain forms of it, I suppose. But, uh and then and then the last thing is is really about productization. So, how do we get those things into the goods? Um you know, it's normally not, hey, I'm just going to build a whole jet [clears throat] fighter out of critical minerals because that's not the case. It's it's actually the components. So what are those what are those manufacturing techniques tools to to get it into like a magnet form or or a structural component or something? >> One of the really important application areas too.

So across each of these um discovery of feed stocks like we're about to talk some more about with um Sahil and Adamiionics um the refining phase metalization and then the application of these. Do we invest in each of those categories? >> Yeah, we invest across all of those categories and we have investments in each one of them. >> Great. feed stocks. I know we've talked about before in the past, it is about the discovery.

Sometimes it's terrestrial. There's also the potential to find these types of minerals deep sea as well. Um there could be the ability to have recycling as a strategy and even synthetics that could replace some of them. I know we investigated times too. So across each of these sub areas, there's more dimensions that you're thinking about architecturally about where there could be gaps that we could invest in.

>> Yes. >> Great. Hey Sahil, as we think about the area of feed stock and discovery and we were talking before about the quantum sensing, is this just a concept? Um, have you moved it beyond the lab? Is this actually in practice something that can be proven out how quantum sensing can actually identify and better um improve the economics of of mining for feed stocks terrestrially? >> Absolutely. Um, you know, this is happening as we speak right now. Maybe to set the context.

I'm not sure if you guys have seen the movie Dune, but there's a great quote there. He who controls the spice controls the universe. And as much as Dune was science fiction, we live in a world where this quote is still true. Uh just replace spice with critical minerals. And I think this is essentially what uh you know we are trying to resolve at Ationics.

As I as I shared earlier, discovery and delineation and finding new minerals and I think Russ also alluded how hard and time consuming this process is. It almost takes a decade or more to discover a deposit and identify what that over body looks like. And now this is fundamentally because you know the kind of uh data that we use is extremely sparse in resource exploration. It is really uh drilling which is used as an exploration tool. Uh practically what we are doing is using drills as poking holes in the ground and trying to see if there is something over there or not.

And if you can imagine doing that then you know this would definitely take more than a decade. And so we are rethinking this process of discovery of like where new minerals comes from. At A atom I um we we have essentially be built these quantum gravimeters that can help us map large areas of land rapidly and understand what's going on underground before anyone else does uh and shorten that process to instead of discovering one deposit every 10 years to discovering 10 deposits every year and that is the ambition that we have at atm. So when we think about quantum sensing, is this an area where you actually have to be attached to the ground and be very close to the surface in order to create a map or how do we create a map of an entire state or a nation? Can you do this from the air? >> Absolutely. You do not have to just be on the ground.

What we are building are quantum sensors that can be deployed on drones. And you can envision a fleet of drones mapping out large states um or doing data acquisition over the whole state of Texas or Arizona or Nevada. Um and something that would have taken otherwise at least uh 3 to four years to just acquire data can now be done in the span of you know three to four months. And that is the ability that allows us to map out large areas of land rapidly. >> I think congratulations are in order because you recently um secured growth financing and I think part of the purpose is to continue to work on that shrinking the miniaturaturization of the quantum sensing system to be able to be become so basketballized to be able to attach to a drone that enables your ability to be able to go scan from the air.

Is that right? Tell me a little bit about your next plans. >> Absolutely. We are grateful to have the support of uh Pasalis who led the round and alongside that BHP ventures the venture arm of one of the largest mining companies also participated alongside uh Inqutel and some other awesome folks. Now this capital actually allows us to uh further quantum sensing on three main three main vectors. one we are, you know, miniaturaturizing these sensors such that we can now put this onto the size of a shoe box.

Practically we have managed to squeeze an atomic physics lab into this size. Um, beyond that, secondly, we are expanding our operations to uh to other nations including Australia uh which is one of the biggest suppliers of these metals uh to the world. Um and thirdly, we are essentially utilizing the data to build um a large planet model. The same way that chat GPT is powered by an LLM, we believe that we can essentially build a large planet model that can be something like a chat GPT but for the Earth's crust. >> Your goals though, I think go beyond just being a service provider where someone can query.

Do you actually see the way that you can start to penetrate and extract more value out of the mining supply chain acting in a sense as a junior miner? Can you explain a little bit how your business model works and how the industry is organized? >> Yeah, definitely. Right now, um, if we if we look at how the industry is organized, there are the the the major mining company or the large mining companies like BHP and Riotintos of the world. These are uh mining companies that focus on extraction as well as some part of exploration. But beyond that, there are a set of companies called junior exploration companies whose sole role is to essentially go out there into the field and look for new minerals. At A atom Ionics, we are essentially supporting some of these mining companies and going full stack in exploration, going from a piece of land to ultimately discovering an orbody which essentially becomes a financial asset.

And our business model also revolves around you know aligning our incentives with the incentives of our partners and essentially um have some skin in the game by helping these companies find these deposits faster and benefiting from it by getting a percentage of some of these deposits that we help discover. >> So you're you're not thinking of becoming like a 10 million or hund00 million revenue company. Are we talking billion and billions here of value that Adamionics could be unlocking and participating in? >> Absolutely. Fundamentally, we believe that uh there is a potential to build a hundred billion dollar company uh to even a trillion dollar company in the space of uh minerals and metals. But it goes beyond that.

you know, resources that help power uh humanity not just today but also in the future. Beyond minerals, this can be used for geological hydrogen, geothermal and any other source of uh commodity that we might need from the underground. This tool can help us get there. And this is essentially uh the company that we want to be. We want to be that company that essentially helps provide these resources for not just our generation but the next future generations as well.

>> You know a perfect example Russ of the power of an entrepreneur to take on new opportunities where innovation can actually unlock value. Uh% can can you help speak to a little bit because I know Sil is um appreciative of how our critical minerals portfolio sort of works together and has an overlap. Can we share the spotlight to talk a little bit also about some other examples of companies that we've invested across the landscape outside of uh feed stock as well? >> Outside of feed stock outside of exploration. >> I still have exploration. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We we've actually um I believe on our website we have quite a quite a few. Uh one that's probably [clears throat] near and dear to your heart is Phoenix Tailings.

It's you know really coming up with something innovative around uh separation and refining. Right. So, how do how do we get at these uh rare earth minerals and how do we do that here in the United States? Um, we have other ones that are thinking a little bit further about, well, what's nextgen separation look like um with alta resource uh and and looking at how can biological proteins be produced to be selective to a rare earth element, right? Or or other fe other critical minerals. So how can it you know in a dilute fluid just grab that that one atom right and uh and then you know and and and contain it and separate it. Um we have uh we you know we have ones that are in the in deep sea mining uh you know enabling new new business models there.

um it it really it's it's quite expansive. And we've we've also looked at um how do we separate lithium, right? How do you do that efficiently and not deplete brine that that's in in groundwater, right? The aquifer. Um so we have we have companies in that. We have companies looking at recycling uh uh minerals on the on the end of the supply chain. So like after the product's been, you know, thrown away, how do you get those minerals back out of them >> to regenerate the feed stock? >> Regenerate the feed stock.

And even even a step further than that, we have ones that are thinking about, well, magnets, right? How do we if if that product has a magnet in it with rare earths, how do we turn that into a new magnet? How do we how do we make sure that it it uh it gets back into the into the um uh supply chain? um similar to what you've seen in like lead acid batteries where like over 96% of all lead acid batteries are recycled, right? Which is which is incredible. I think we should be striving to do that in in in all of these supply chains, you know, reintroducing the materials. Yeah. So important to understand there the the role that IQT takes in order to identify key areas to invest in. How to then pick out the great entrepreneurs like Sahil and others that are building in this category really valuable companies that are moving at the speed and scale to make national impact to secure resilient supply chain in order to be able to have access to these minerals that build the products that we all depend upon and that we depend upon both in everyday life in our infrastructure and also in defense systems that are important to our national security.

So, Sahil, just want to turn it back to you for a moment. How how as an entrepreneur what what other insights do you gain through portfolio connections with us in order to think about the um the ecosystem where you should be building where the opportunities are and do we think in the future that we're able to build more of this domestically in the US as well both from the identification of these deposits the exploration phase that you're so important in in quantum sensing and as as Russ mentioned you know we have companies like Phoenix tailings that soon to operate a refining and metalization process is here domestically to create some of the rare earths that are most important in those magnet applications and sensors. Uh another portfolio company Novon I think building there as well that then end up in these advanced systems in the automobiles that depend upon them around uh uh motors electric motors specifically um in um uh uh space uh vehicles in things like our satellites radar advanced defense systems um airplanes etc. Sahil, how do how do you see the landscape and what's happening internationally? Um, will we be able to secure this back in the US as well? >> I'm extremely confident that we'll be able to secure this uh in the United States as well. Not just because of not just because of our you know not just because of the the work that uh we're doing in exploration but also some of the amazing work being done by other entrepreneurs to you know figure out refining figure out processing um maybe you know and and this has been the this has been the key this has been the the key to the success uh historically which is you know uh in the United states, we've always had a technological solution to majority of the problems that we've seen um in the past and I think the same thing also applies for the for the domain of critical minerals.

uh historically uh the US has been a massive producer and a major player in the domain of minerals and this I see just as a small blip uh in terms of where you know we've sort of not had a resilient supply chain but we will soon get there. Um, internationally, you know, one of the other main things that, uh, we have ongoing for us is, you know, our our strength with our allies, Canada and Australia are two of the biggest producers of minerals. Uh, they have abundant feed stock and and you know, we have strong partnership with both of these parties where we can essentially also build this together as uh, as a strong allied force. >> That's great. you know, let's take a moment.

>> No, just just one step further is, you know, it's it's an uphill battle, right? Um, we really need to think about the cost competition with the currently entrenched supply chains. And so I think it's a it's a vital time to look towards the startup community, those entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to figure out well frankly not just how to duplicate it here in the United States, but how do we unlock that value chain, how do we bring down costs so that we can actually be competitive here um uh here in the United States and with our allies around the world. Uh I think that that's the big unlock that we need to be pursuing. >> Yeah. And I'll just add to that you know um on one hand we have entrepreneurs figuring out the technical challenges but at the same time you know there are certain things which are happening which are beyond our control and and this is essentially where strong industrial policy comes into picture that supports homegrown solution as well as uh policies that protect from unfair practices that are rampant in the domain of critical minerals by you know other adversarial parties.

>> So let's focus on the critical part of critical minerals for a second. We've been recapping learning today about the um the the impact the reason why these are so important to the economy. Looking also about how the um the the entrepreneur and the innovation space is so critical to this as well that the processes that are legacy and just the incumbent approaches are not enough in order to secure a future supply chain. and how our allies too are important to this vision of how we're going to be able to identify feed stocks and be able to have the processing resources that we need and the applications we need that are important to the economy. >> So Sahil quantum sensing we began to learn a little bit about and you were going to shine some more light for us.

You know what what is quantum sensing? How does it operate? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Um quantum sensors are based on the core technology cold atom interferometry. In cold atom interferometry, we shoot lasers at atoms. And as these atoms interact with the lasers, they give out photons. That's nothing but the kinetic energy of the atoms being lost.

And as these atoms lose their kinetic energy and slow down, they're termed as cold because in physics, you end up establishing the temperature of an entity by the vibration or the speed of their motion. At that stage the wave nature of atoms becomes more prominent. You know how atoms show both wave and particle duality. This is the fundamental quantum mechanical uh property that we exploit and we essentially use this matter wave nature to create an interferometer and measure gravity. Now these systems are used to detect gravitational waves and black holes in the lab.

And at ationics, we're taking a different pathway by miniaturaturizing them and deploying them in the field so that we can essentially measure gravity and help figure out what's going on underground. >> Fascinating, Russ, how in only a couple hundred years we've moved from basically shaking water in a pan to discover mineral [laughter] to to cold quantum being the application layer. But but Sahil, it sounds so futuristic. What is the state-of-the-art now? What's happening now in the field? Yeah, it you know whenever I describe something like this, everyone thinks that this is actually at least 10 years away. But the the fundamental reality is that like you know in the past 3 years we've managed to squeeze this into uh we've essentially managed to squeeze this into a already a mini fridge and that is being deployed outside in the Arizona desert as well as the Australian outback to figure out what's going on underground with some of the world's largest mining companies.

So this is actually happening as we speak. Uh and it is not something that we have to wait for at least a decade. >> So you're producing a lot of data and you mentioned before having an AI model that ties this together. How how actually do we resolve distance, size, scale in in your system. How do we get down to the level of being able to map the state, map the nation, map the world? That's a great question and and you know we've been using gravity since the 1950s to look for things underground.

So that is not a new concept but right now we still stuck in the 1950s of data acquisition too. We imagine a box being taken to the field by a geologist. You place that box u it takes 10 minutes to measure one data point. You repeat that every 100 meters for thousands of miles. Now this is how present day data acquisition works which ends up taking nearly uh you know a year or more to actually capture that size of data set.

But if you think about it if someone tells you that hey within these three football fields there is some minerals over there uh that is actually not actionable at all. you would end up having to drill through all of those football fields to figure out where that small veiny ore body that houses the highest grade or that makes it economical actually resides. And so what quantum sensing does is that it essentially allows us to measure gravity as we are moving and creates uh data sets that are 10,000 times higher spatial resolution. So now your uh pixel that was the size of a football field has gone down to the size of a couple of pizza boxes and this is essentially what we utilize uh to create a 3D map. And the interesting thing is that over the past three to five years we've had an incredible amount of progress in the domain of uh vision as well as in the domain of AI and we are practically applying you know the advances that were made in the domain say for autonomous vehicles or even for detecting your cat but instead applying it to gravimetry or gravity data to figure out where your next copper deposit you know, great point, Sahil, and and Russ, let's tie that together.

Um, we're we're honored to have entrepreneurs that are able to solve problems like this in the portfolio. Um, the companies that share this element of not just working on new deep tech um applications of specialized technology, but how AI is fusing the ability then to utilize that data or improve the processes more quickly to create that economic benefit, have a cost competitive process in all these different areas. a theme you think across the portfolio? >> Um yeah, definitely a theme across the portfolio and a theme across the the larger landscape of critical minerals. Um we're seeing a lot of companies uh start to develop techn uh techniques and technology that that will tie these very very you know uh innovative sensor technologies into useful information. Well, we're excited and proud to have uh entrepreneurs like Sahil and others in the portfolio.

We also have a shout out and thanks to our co-investors who are helping to enable these uh important advancements uh in every area of the critical minerals landscape. So, I want to really thank um Sahil uh uh from Adamics, Russ from IQT from helping to shine a light and a physicist and a chemist to be able to help us break down what is so important in critical minerals. Thanks for listening to this episode of IT Explains a series on the IT podcast. Subscribe for more, leave us a review, and visit www.it.org to learn how tech is shaping national security. Thank you.

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