Tech Thursday is taking on a new format for the Fall - Tech Thursday Live!
Instead of our typical panel format, we’re trying something new.
A tech show in front of a live audience. We hope that the new format has same focus on tech that you know and love, while keeping the events more lively and entertaining. We’re excited to have fun with these!
The show will be hosted by Mark Le Dain, CRO at Fuelled, and myself, Philippe Burns. Prior to his role at Fuelled, Mark held executive roles at Neo Financial and Validere after they came out of Y Combinator. He is a published author and contributor on energy, fintech, and markets for the Financial Post and several other publications.
Each show will have different segments that could include:
Tech News and Analysis
Founder Interviews
Reacting to LinkedIn Posts
Product Launches
CEO’s reading mean Glassdoor Reviews
We have two events coming up! September 3rd and September 24th.
September 3rd:
Guests are TBA
September 24th:
Guests are TBA
Tech Thursday is thrilled to welcome Ramp as our new title sponsor!
Ramp launched in Canada this summer and is building a dedicated Canadian team. The company helps businesses save time and money by bringing corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, and accounting automation into one platform. They serve over 70,000 customers globally today.
Ramp’s support will help us bring more ambitious programming, and more leading voices from finance, technology, and operations, to Calgary’s tech community. We couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead.
At the beginning of the summer, I was lucky enough to take a tour of GeologicAI. They’re 13 years old, have raised $100M, and have 330 people. Their focus is to accelerate AI-driven discovery and development of critical minerals globally.
In my opinion, one of the most interesting Calgary companies quietly crushing it. Enjoy this recap and clips from our tour of GeologicAI with Grant Sanden, CEO and Founder at GeologicAI, and John Mortimer, CTO at GeologicAI.
"One of our mentors was like, don't go into mining. That's a terrible idea."
GeologicAI builds robots that scan drill core. X-ray for elemental data, hyperspectral cameras for light response, lasers and high resolution imaging for texture, all captured at once and co-located. Mining companies use the output to decide where to dig. The robots are welded, assembled and tested in a warehouse in Calgary, and they ship to sites in Argentina, Ecuador and everywhere else rock gets pulled out of the ground.
You can watch the full facility tour here. Or, listen to my interview with Grant Sanden and John Mortimer on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
1. The eight year detour
The first eight years were consulting projects for oil companies. Oil sands, SAGD, rock analytics. Then Grant went to the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) in 2019, saw the scale of rock flows in mining, and realized the technology already worked for a market where the business model actually closed. Nearly everyone advised against it, including one of his own mentors. Six of the world’s top ten mining majors are now on global contracts with them.
The company raised its Series A in 2023, thirteen years in. It is now capital break even and growing, which Grant describes as the nice part: they don’t have to raise anymore.
2. The Copper Crunch and why Geology is the Biggest Lever
The average mine takes about 17 years to come online. Copper demand is climbing from data centres and the energy transition at the same time, and by Grant’s numbers the industry needs something like $400B of investment against a historical maximum of $70B. Better geological interpretation compounds through everything downstream. One study of iron ore contaminants found a 5 to 10% improvement in furnace performance. Applied across the industry, Grant puts a 5% gain at the emissions equivalent of taking 40 million cars off the road.
GeologicAI is the largest player in rock scanning and holds about 1.5% of the market. Make of that what you will.
3. They operate their own Copper Mine
Customers won't tell you what your product is really worth to them, because it isn't in their interest to. So GeologicAI started operating a former copper mine in Arizona and ran everything end to end on it themselves. Early drill optimization work returned around $6M in savings after two weeks. They're tracking somewhere between 10 and 50 times capital efficiency improvement on the site, and the neighbouring operation has drilled 160 holes at roughly $100K each and is still waiting on results.
Takeaways for builders
Field experience is a moat. Grant’s example: taking instruments from minus three degrees to plus thirty in an hour in Bolivia and learning how they respond. Dust, calibration, temperature. Nobody can shortcut that.
On AI in high stakes industries: you can’t hallucinate in mining. They run dedicated math and scientific principles first, then layer LLMs on top. Nobody is making a multi-billion dollar subsurface decision off a chatbot.
Grant’s least favourite thing in Canadian business is what he calls ‘the Canadian no’, meaning the slow drift into a no that never gets said. An honest, specific rejection is worth more to a company than six months of maybe.
They hired 60 people in the first half of the year and are planning another 60 to 80 before it’s out. Roughly 140 of their 330 are in Calgary. They are hiring:
Full Stack Developer (Backend & Compute)
A big thank you to our sponsors Ramp, Boast, BLG, Alberta Innovates, Skip, and Crestview.