AI's Deep Dig: Terra AI Lands $20M to Unearth Earth’s Hidden Resources

PALO ALTO, CA – June 03, 2026 – In a significant move to accelerate the discovery of resources vital for the global economy, Terra AI today announced it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round. The investment, led by deep-tech venture capital firm Khosla Ventures with strategic participation from mining giant BHP’s venture arm, BHP Ventures, aims to scale an AI platform that promises to digitally map the Earth’s subsurface and dramatically shorten the timeline for mineral and energy exploration.

Terra AI is tackling one of the resource sector’s most intractable problems: the immense time, cost, and uncertainty involved in finding and developing new deposits. The company’s technology provides a stark contrast to traditional methods, which can take an average of 17 years to bring a new discovery to production. This funding injection signals powerful confidence from both Silicon Valley and the established resources industry that artificial intelligence is the key to unlocking the next generation of critical materials.

A New Lens on the Subsurface

At the heart of Terra AI's innovation is a patented generative modeling engine that functions like a super-powered MRI for the planet. The platform ingests and fuses vast, disparate datasets—from geophysics and geochemistry to historical drilling logs—and uses them to generate millions of geologically plausible 3D models of the underground in mere minutes. This is a monumental leap from conventional geological modeling, which is often a slower, more interpretive process.

"Explorers today face increasing complexities like rising project uncertainty and immense pressure to bring new resources online faster," said John Mern, CEO of Terra AI. "This investment enables us to move to the next phase of Terra AI's growth by scaling our generative modeling engine, accelerating enterprise-grade deployments, and advancing the subsurface inference technology the industry needs to meet critical mineral demand."

Where traditional software often stops at visualization, Terra AI’s platform goes a step further. Its “geology reasoning agent” provides what the company calls “risk-quantified decision insights.” Instead of just showing a picture of what might be underground, the system evaluates a vast range of possibilities to tell explorers the probability of success, helping them optimize drilling targets and assess project economics with unprecedented rigor at the earliest stages. According to the company, this approach has already demonstrated the potential to reduce the required drilling meters by 50-60% and deliver a two to three-fold increase in resource prediction precision.

The Strategic Bet on Subsurface Intelligence

The dual backing from a premier venture capital firm and a global mining leader underscores the technology’s disruptive potential. Khosla Ventures, known for its early and ambitious bets on world-changing companies like OpenAI and Impossible Foods, sees a similar paradigm shift in resource exploration.

"The world's ability to discover and develop critical resources is fundamentally constrained by outdated, fragmented exploration," stated Rajesh Swaminathan, Partner at Khosla Ventures. "Terra AI is defining a new, AI-native exploration approach with their continuously improving 3D Earth model. We believe their technology will dramatically accelerate the development of the critical minerals the world needs, and we're excited to help them scale this vision globally."

For BHP Ventures, the investment is a strategic move to maintain a competitive edge in an industry under pressure to become more efficient and sustainable. As the world’s largest copper producer, BHP has a vested interest in technologies that can streamline the discovery of materials essential for the energy transition. This investment follows a pattern for the resources giant, which has previously partnered with other AI-driven exploration firms to unlock value from its vast datasets.

"Successful exploration depends on reducing geological uncertainty and progressing opportunities efficiently," noted Laurel Buckner, VP of Ventures at BHP. "Terra AI's technology has the potential to improve drill targeting, support faster prospect evaluation, and help explorers focus capital on the highest-value opportunities."

This industry-wide embrace is further validated by Terra AI’s earlier investors and partners, including mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, which participated in a previous seed round and is also a strategic client.

Fueling the Global Resource Race

The timing of this technological advancement is critical. The global transition to clean energy and electric vehicles is creating unprecedented demand for minerals like copper, lithium, and rare earth elements (REEs). The International Energy Agency has repeatedly warned that current supply pipelines are insufficient to meet projected needs, creating a risk of significant bottlenecks that could slow the fight against climate change. Terra AI's platform directly addresses this challenge by compressing the time and capital needed to define and develop new resources.

Over the past year, the company has successfully deployed its platform on commercial projects spanning copper, gold, and REEs, building a strong customer base that includes Ero Copper and Ramaco Resources. By increasing resource definition by a claimed 2.5 times compared to traditional methods, the technology not only accelerates discovery but also makes previously uneconomic or marginal deposits viable for development, expanding the potential pool of global resources.

Beyond Extraction: A Frontier in Sustainability

While the immediate focus is on finding new resources, Terra AI’s technology has powerful applications in environmental stewardship. The same subsurface modeling capabilities are now being applied to one of the most pressing challenges in climate technology: carbon capture and storage (CCS). The long-term safety and permanence of CCS depend on selecting geological formations that can securely contain CO2 for millennia. By generating probabilistic models of underground structures, Terra AI can help identify and de-risk the most suitable sites for permanent carbon sequestration.

This dual-use capability positions the company not just as an enabler of resource extraction but as a key player in the broader climate tech ecosystem. By making exploration more precise, it reduces the physical footprint and environmental disruption of drilling. By enabling safer carbon storage, it contributes to mitigating emissions from hard-to-abate industries.

The new capital will be used to accelerate the deployment of Terra AI's platform across its target sectors, including mining, enhanced geothermal energy, and carbon storage, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in our understanding of the world beneath our feet.