Copper is critical to the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The metal is an excellent conductor of electricity, used in everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines. But by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency expects copper supplies to fall 20% short of demand.
One stealthily operating startup thinks it can narrow the gap by helping miners extract more copper from their mines. To do that, Colorado-based Endolith is turning to microbes.
Today, most copper is recovered using hydrometallurgy, which generally involves pouring acid on piles of rock, which strips out some portion of the copper. Endolith supplements that, adding what are essentially domesticated microbes that can boost the amount of copper that leaches out of the pile.
“Conservatively, we think we can get 10% more copper,” Liz Dennett, founder and CEO of Endolith, told TechCrunch. The company is one of the startups that will be participating in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
The industry is likely to welcome anything to boost recovery rates. Mining for metals is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Prospectors spend hours searching for potentially profitable deposits. Then miners spend years digging it up and dousing it with chemicals to recover scant amounts of metal. In the case of copper, the rocks at a mine contain about 1% copper; of that, only about half is typically recovered, Dennett said.
To eke out an extra 10% or more, Endolith starts by studying the conditions within a particular mine’s heap leach, as the pile is known. After taking samples from various parts of the pile, the startup inoculates the samples with microbes it thinks might be well suited. Then, it takes the most promising candidates and accelerates their evolution in the lab by exposing them to increasingly stressful conditions like high arsenic or salty water, depending on the conditions of the heap. The result is a community of microbes that can liberate more copper from the rock.
“We are turning normal microbes into Olympic-caliber athletes,” Dennett said.
Dennett, who has a PhD in geomicrobiology, had previously been CTO of Cemvita, a company that uses microbes to transform waste into more valuable materials. “The group I naturally gravitated towards was the biomining group,” she said. “The board asked me to step in and see if there was a there there. What do we do with it? Do we sell it? Do we spin it? What would it take to ultimately make this super successful?”
Last year, the company spun out Endolith as an independent entity and Dennett started fundraising. Now, the startup has raised an oversubscribed $5.13 million seed round led by Collaborative Fund and Overture, with participation from Grok Ventures, Nomadic Venture Partners and Nucleus Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
“We got a term sheet in six weeks,” she said, adding that the round closed in about three months. Cemvita remains “a very minor stakeholder,” Dennett added. “They have very little to do with our day to day.”
One big change from Cemtiva has been winnowing the number of product lines from five to two: Copper and lithium. “We’ve been laser focused,” she said. “Everyone loves the platform company until it comes time to commercialize.
