Rio Tinto has backed 29 startups — and two-thirds of them have gone on to trial inside the miner

Rio Tinto's mining tech accelerator with Founders Factory picked five startups from more than 500 applicants. The most instructive number, though, is a different one: the rate at which earlier cohorts moved from pitch to a real pilot.

On 5 October 2026, Founders Factory, a London-based startup studio, and Rio Tinto presented the fifth cohort of the mining technology accelerator they run together. The programme lasts four months and received more than 500 applications for this round. Five companies were selected: Cascade Geomatics, from the US, which monitors geohazards for mining and infrastructure; Fieldstone, also American, which uses biology to measure metals quickly; Determinant Materials, from the US, which proposes refining critical metals as micro particles at the point of origin; NanduX, operating in the US and Chile, focused on copper exploration with deep sensing; and Blueprint, a platform from Australia's Imvelo to support economic decisions in mining. Those selected gain direct access to Rio Tinto's executive leadership and technical experts, to the company's operations in Western Australia and to a structured pathway to pilots and proofs of concept. With this cohort, the portfolio totals 29 startups. According to the organisers, two-thirds of them have trialled, are trialling or are under contract with the miner. Among earlier cohorts, Terra AI raised US$20 million in a Series A round and Spoor raised €8 million.

Mining has a reputation for being slow to adopt technology, and the reason is rarely a lack of ideas. It is the well-known "valley of death" between prototype and operation. A startup can prove a concept in the lab, but it needs to test in a real mine to convince any customer — and no mine wants to be the first to risk production on equipment that has never run in the field. The accelerator model attacks exactly this deadlock. What it offers is not only capital: it is access to a real operation, to technical staff who know the problem and to a route already designed to become a pilot. That is why the most revealing metric in the announcement is not the number of applications but the conversion rate. Two-thirds of 29 companies means something close to 19 startups that have gone on to work inside Rio Tinto. In corporate innovation programmes, the opposite is common: many companies accelerated, few hired. There is another lesson in the profile of those chosen. None offers a generic "digital transformation" product. Each targets a physical and costly bottleneck in the chain: the slope that may move, the grade that takes days to come back from the lab, the concentrate that has to travel thousands of kilometres to be refined, the copper deposit that is too deep for conventional methods. It is a snapshot of where the industry sees value now — in critical minerals, in deep exploration and in the speed of information. For those working at a miner, the model is a useful reference: define the problems before seeking solutions, open the operation to controlled trials and measure success by pilots and contracts, not by demo days. For those thinking of starting a business in the sector, it shows that the shortest path to a customer may be the miner's own programme.

The sector needs to increase copper and critical metals output with falling grades, deeper deposits and growing demands for safety and lower impact. Much of the solution will come from outside the miners, from small technology companies. The bottleneck is the move from trial to scale, and programmes that guarantee access to pilots speed up that path. For professionals, this widens possible careers: the geologist, process engineer or geotechnical technician who understands the operation's problem is exactly the profile these startups are looking for — as founder, partner or first internal customer.