Post by Verve Ventures

Atana Elements has closed a $27.5 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital to accelerate the discovery of critical mineral resources using AI-driven exploration of flowing mineral systems. The global race to secure lithium, copper, and other critical minerals is running into a structural wall: demand for lithium alone is projected to require roughly three times current known reserves and an estimated $250 billion in capital investment over the coming decade. Legacy hard rock mining is too slow, too costly, and increasingly constrained by geopolitics. Atana addresses this by targeting flowing mineral systems. Subsurface brines, dissolved gases, and in-situ deposits. This offers superior economics and a lower environmental footprint compared to conventional extraction. The company combines decades of fluid-system expertise from BP, Hess, Rio Tinto, and ExxonMobil with proprietary geospatial databases and AI/ML tools to identify and de-risk targets in a fraction of the time. A proof point: Atana's team drove the discovery and divestment of a top-10 global lithium brine asset in 2025, delivering a ~5x return in three years. In a process that typically takes five to ten years, completed in 22 months. Why this matters: - Atana has already licensed prospective lithium resources estimated at over 100 million tonnes LCE across the EU and the Americas, providing a running start as the structural supply deficit deepens. - The seed round - backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Verve Ventures, Borusan Ventures, Volta Energy Technologies, and others. - AI-accelerated exploration compresses the discovery-to-production timeline at a moment when Western governments, including the U.S. with its $12 billion Project Vault, are actively investing to secure domestic supply chains. At Verve Ventures, we back companies building at the intersection of deep tech and the energy transition. Atana's ability to apply oil & gas operational discipline alongside modern AI to one of the most critical supply chain bottlenecks of our era is precisely the kind of infrastructure-layer innovation our thesis is built around. Congratulations to Tom Wilson and the entire Atana Elements team. #AtanaElements #CriticalMinerals #LithiumExploration #EnergyTransition #DeepTech #VentureCapital #VerveVentures