Skyrocketing demand for copper promises to push prices to new heights. As the global economy transitions away from fossil fuels, it is going to need twice as much copper in the coming years than humanity has mined throughout all of its existence.
Still Bright, a New Jersey-based startup founded in 2022, thinks it has found a novel (and cleaner way) to slash those costs.
“The fact that we’ve already mined the easily mineable stuff, and the fact that we need many more mines to come into production every year — we’re talking like 60-plus mines — is it seems like an impossibility, like there’s no path to get there,” Randy Allen, co-founder and CEO of Still Bright, told TechCrunch.
But a large fraction of that demand could be met if companies can extract more copper from the ore they already mine.
Still Bright has developed a new way to extract copper, one that it says can recover nearly all the copper from typical ores without pre-processing steps that lose up to 20% of the metal. It’s effective enough that it could even be used on tailings, the discard piles that still contain smaller amounts of the metal that mines leave behind.
“Any copper that was lost as waste, we can actually process that and get the copper back,” Allen said.
To boost production from single digits to hundreds of tons per year, Still Bright has raised an $18.7 million seed round led by Material Impact and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Azolla Ventures, Fortescue, Impact Science Ventures, and SOSV participated.