As the West races to secure critical mineral supply chains, technology is reinventing how we discover, extract, and refine the resources that underpin everything from energy to defense. The companies that move now — software-native, vertically integrated, and built for speed — will define the future of mining. Yet no one has taken the aggressive, full-stack swing the moment demands. Until now.
Today, we’re announcing our investment in a company that champions that vision: Mariana Minerals.
As we explained in a recent post, the bottleneck in expanding minerals production capacity isn’t geology — it’s coordination. Today, operations rely on Excel files passed between EPCs, regulators, and owners; static mine plans; and decisions made long after data is available. Critical actions like ore routing, reagent dosing, or equipment procurement are delayed or misaligned because the systems are fragmented and slow.
Mariana is different. It’s a systems company, building the software layer that brings real-time intelligence to mining. Mariana turns what today is reactive and manual into something precise, adaptive, and fast. To do this, Mariana is building an integrated software platform that spans the entire lifecycle of mine — from capital project delivery to mining operations and chemical refining. It replaces fragmented workflows with real-time coordination, telemetry-driven control, and AI-optimized decision-making.
And unlike software that sits siloed inside a traditional mining company that can’t absorb modern practices, software built natively within Mariana compounds: integrating seamlessly, reinforcing one another, and accelerating execution. With every new site brought online, Mariana captures more data and operational insight, continuously improving the system and driving down the cost and timeline of the next project.
Critically, Mariana is full-stack. It designs, permits, finances, commissions, and operates. It pours the concrete. It operates the haul truck. Where incumbents take twelve years to get a single lithium project into production, Mariana has set a target that sounds like heresy: 10 mineral projects in 10 years. Three sites — spanning lithium, copper, and nickel — are already under development in the United States, with the first refined product projected to be delivered by year’s end.
Before SpaceX, the smartest engineers didn’t touch aerospace. Before Palantir and Anduril, Stanford’s top grads wouldn’t go near defense. Mining has never had a magnet like that, but Mariana Minerals is creating one. Chemists, ML engineers, and field ops sit side by side, all owning the outcome and sharing in the upside — a rare blend of Silicon Valley mindset and dirt-under-the-fingernails execution.
The idea behind Mariana is simple and compelling: we cannot outcompete China with whitepapers and pilots. We need to break rock and move earth. Now.
Behind this bold vision is a team built for the mission. CEO Turner Caldwell led Tesla’s metals and minerals team, deploying billions in dollars across the company’s lithium and battery facilities. CTO Juan Lozano scaled ML systems at Affirm and Kite, bringing technical range and a track record of shipping real-world AI systems. CFO Baker Tilney previously founded and scaled an integrated energy company focused on revitalizing American production assets, later sold to Vitol. Alongside them are chemical engineers from BASF and Exxon, EPC leads from Jacobs, and operators from Tesla.
Mariana won’t unlock every constraint by itself. Permitting can still be a bureaucratic challenge. Exploration still needs better tooling. Processing still needs novel chemistries. But while most majors relegate new tools to innovation labs or dump them in tailings ponds, Mariana drags them onto the critical path. If a piece of technology adds velocity, it will build it. If somebody else can go faster on a subcomponent, it will partner. This is mining at war speed.
If you want to get your hands dirty and work on one of the most important problems in America, Mariana Minerals is hiring in San Francisco, Houston, and other locations. It’s time to mine.
