I love investing in obessive geniuses building utopian technologies. We do this through Rolling Fun with my partners Bo and Al. When founders are ok with us making our investments public, we like to share the stories with you. Here is one from this week.

New Investment: Watoga

All Your Mines Are Belong To Us

When was the last time you thought about mining?

Do you have any idea where all of the metal in your hands, screens, and house came from? What about batteries, spaceships, and jewelry?

It is a massive market, completely invisible to most people. The global mining market is around $2 trillion – up there with Automotive, Agriculture, and Defense.

However, they are often running at the ragged edge – understaffed, stretched thin, and without the time and resources to operate with complete and current data.

Enter Watoga...

The Problem and Product

Hard-rock mining operations (one type of mining) are about $500 billion per year. They use a “Drilling and Blasting” process to explode rock into fragments for transport, crushing, and processing.

They blast weekly or even daily, often based on outdated mine plans and little information about rock formations. Mining operations do not currently have the tools in place to measure ore veins precisely and reorient after each blast. This leads to frequent multi-million dollar errors that are currently accepted as ‘just part of the process.’

Watoga Technologies is automating the operations side of the mining operation, starting with blast design, predicting the rock formation pre-blast, generating plans for drilling and explosives, then simulating the outcome to improve blast efficiency.

Early demos indicate that improvements creating tens of millions of dollars per year are possible. Implemented widely, and with additional products, this could be an improvement of 5-20% efficiency across the industry, resulting in $100B of new value created.

The Founders

This company isn’t likely to work with industry outsiders vibe-coding from an apartment in San Francisco. The Watoga team has hands-on experience working in mines, graduated from top mining schools, and is building on-site with their customers.

Elliot Forcier-Poirier is Co-founder and CEO. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill, one of the top mining universities in the world. Previously founded another mining software company. Follow him on Twitter/X.
Samuel Desjardins is Co-founder and COO. He studied Mining Engineering at McGill and has worked as a drill-and-blast mining engineer for the past two years.
Roko Baljak is Co-founder and CTO, and studied Computer Science at McGill as well.

I found it interesting how small (in terms of individuals) the mining world is relative to the size of the industry. McGill only graduates about 40 people per year from their mining program, ranked as the 3rd best in the world. The Colorado School of Mines, the top-ranked program in the world, graduates only a few dozen mining engineers per year. The total output of mining engineers in the USA is about 300 per year.

Consider the scale of this industry, how few people are actually in a position to notice these problems and gain the credibility with Mine Directors to get solutions implemented. It was clear from our conversation and references that Elliot is extremely sharp, fluent, and fast. Truly unique talent in this industry can create a tremendous amount of value.

Plan for World Domination

We believe this could be an important business and a great outcome based on a software and sensor product alone ($1B+). The best possible outcomes are even higher than that. There are precedents in this industry for those with efficiency advantages to become contracted operators.

Here’s the master plan:

Step One: Build and sell software that improves the operational efficiency of hard rock mines.

Step Two: Implement sensors and cameras that improve the data collection, improving efficiency more.

Step Three: Become a mining operation contractor, using these tools to operate a higher efficiency and margin than any other operators.

Watoga Investment Decision

We made an early commitment to this company’s pre-seed, the first funding round. (I believe the second wire sent overall.)

Thrilled to be partnering with Elliot, Sam, and Roko and eager to see them blow up a lot of rocks more effectively.

Watoga Is Hiring

If you want to help build software for explosions that could be worth billions of dollars, join Watoga. They are currently hiring top 0.1% Machine Learning Engineers, Physics Sim Engineers, Embedded Systems Engineers, and Electrical Engineers.

Reach out to them through their site. (Bonus points for being Canadian.)

Invest with Us

We invest in “obsessive geniuses building utopian technology.” Along with my partners Bo and Al, I love to meet talented people using technology to make the future better. We work hard to find them, get them resources, and support them in their quests.

If you’d like to invest in people like Elliot alongside us and dozens of our friends through Rolling Fun, please apply here or reach out to schedule some time to meet. The fund is open to accredited investors, and the minimum investment is $5k/quarter.

Our New Investment: Software for Mining (and Explosions!)