Shock and Ore - Plotlogic, the best mining-tech company you’ve never heard of, until now

[Music] Welcome to another edition of the New Horns Podcast. This is a podcast series featuring business leaders, motivators, innovators and general go-kids. Well, this time last year, Brisbane-based Mining Tech Startup Plot Logic was pre-revenue. Now it counts three over the four biggest miners in the world among its customers. And according to Plot Logic, this technology could soon revolutionize the entire mining industry. To tell us how, founder and CEO Andrew Job joins us now on the unicorn's podcast. Good day, Andrew. Good day. Good to talk with you. So according to recent media reports, Andrew Plot Logic could exceed $100 million in revenues this year. But last year, you were pre-revenue. That's quite a journey. So how did all of that happen? Well, we're still a private company. So the actual revenue numbers are still reasonably tightly held. But I think the quantum is certainly something we can talk about in terms of the scale and order of magnitude of scale that we're going through. And really what has happened is we started this company with an idea a few years ago. And it's quite a deep technology, a really hard piece of development that needs to happen in order to make this go from an idea to something that could be testable on mind sites. And the idea is that really what we're trying to do is provide sensors across the entire whole body. And that's important because if you get that knowledge with very high degree of precision and get it in real time or close to real time, you can know every single rock in the mind and then use that to drive amazing optimization decisions which reduces greenhouse gases, increases the productivity, increases profitability, and also improves safety by reducing exposure hours and identifying potential hazards before they unravel. And so there was a really a lot of hard research and development that needed to happen for the first few years. But we knew there was a very strong market for what we were doing because we were getting pulled by clients, prior to us having a product even ready to go, saying when can you come to our mind site? And we were fighting and racing as fast as we could to actually get things proven out. We were confident in the tech, but obviously being confident in the tech versus having something usable in the marketplace. It's two different things. So we went from a couple of people when we started off, myself and a postdoc researcher who previously worked at Caltech with 30 odd years experience in optical physics. Our second hire was another postdoc researcher at University City with about 30 odd years in algorithm development for mineral characterization. And that was a sort of foundation team into the quickly after that as we worked through some of these hard tech challenges. We proved it out in the field. And I've got to the point now where we went from essentially zero commercial deployments last year to quite quickly being a position where we essentially can't keep up with demand, which is a really good problem to be in and we're scaring as fast as this possible. And Andrew, what's your professional background? How did you get to be involved with the business? Yes, so I actually came at this from the industry perspective. So I started in the industry back in 1998, actually, literally on the on the coal face back when back when coal was a still a thing, I guess. Still learning. Yeah. And I went through a whole bunch of roles, but essentially got a new degree as an engineer and then worked predominantly in operational management roles. And was always challenged with this idea of how we can really find new ways of generating resources as a planet needs without screwing up things along the way. And that's something that's always set very closely with me for a very long period of time. I went and did a master's degree in finance to help understand that, you know, the business mechanics in a lot more detail. Yeah. It was running mind sites for a company called Anglo-American and then made a decision back in 2000 and 16. I think it was now that I'd go off and do with PhD because I realised to just for a bit of extra torture. Yeah, just for a bit of extra torture. So I'm going to do a PhD to close up some technical gaps in this, I guess, hypothesis that I was working on about how you could really reach all the entire industry. But wanted to make sure I had the technical backing to go ahead and do it. So. And what was your PhD in? Yeah, it has a really sexy title of real-time resource characterization for precision manual extraction. So essentially what I had time reading. Exactly. It's really catchy, isn't it, Seth? But essentially the thesis looked at this idea of using artificial intelligence and use sort of highly sophisticated sensors to then derive information about the rock mass or the ore body and do it essentially in real time and do it autonomously and then use that information to feed into my optimisation. So essentially the PhD was a lot of computer programming, a lot of mechatronics robotics type of work to prove this hypothesis out, resulted in essentially a first of a quiet prototype system that we took out into the wide world and then from there. Did it work in? It did actually work. Yeah, it was in retrospect. I look at it as quite embarrassed by what I built. But I was really proud of it at the time. But I look back now and cringe it go, wow, I can't believe it worked. You know, it's more surprising than me. But essentially we took it to a couple of mindsights to collect some data to help prove out the algorithms that were developing. And the guys on the mindsite said, well, that's fantastic. Can we buy one of these things? And I went, well, that's probably now is a time that I got through the PhD to go and start the business essentially properly and then essentially from there, that's where we went to this commercialisation journey and where we are now. So what exactly does your technology do? Can you take our listeners specifically through the tech and how it works? Yeah, sure. So essentially what we do is we use a set of sensors. And how big are they? About the size of a microwave oven. So if you could imagine a device that's about the size of a microwave oven, looks like it looks like Wally based on it looks like Wally basically. Yeah, I think of that. And what do you do with that? You take it out into the middle of the outback. What do you do? Essentially. So we go and go out and use that scanning system. So we're scanning essentially all the rocks in the mind. And then the sensors that we use that work across the visible near infrared part of the light spectrum in combination with light out, which is the spatial positioning. And some other sensors that we include. We fuse all that data together, which is huge amounts of data. We do it essentially in real time. And then we have very sophisticated algorithms that then use that sensory information to derive insights to say, for example, this particular rock or group of rocks or this part of the mind-faced has very high grades. Goal contained in it is other parts, low grade or waste material. And essentially we can do that. And bypass the traditional drilling program, which relies on very slow processes plus also very sparse data sets. So we're literally grading every single rock just by essentially looking at it and then repeating that process across the entire mind side. Right. So how many give us a sense of the scale? How many sensors do you need to cover a particular area and how deep can you go? Yeah. So we have different product offerings depending on the actual application. So we have one product which is about to be deployed into the market, which essentially goes into blast holes and actually scans inside of blast holes to make those same determination. So we can go as far back as the mind is operating. And then on top of that we have another system which is our core original tech system which essentially scans all the rocks, all the mind faces that becomes a survey instrument essentially that would replace or at least complement existing survey technologies and add this new layer of information. Old surveying technologies rely purely on spatial information and we get this other information on all grade and that at the same time. So they're sort of the two primary pieces that you would need to go onto a mind side and then on top of that we have another system which we fit to ask about this so literally bucket by bucket we make a determination of every single grade of rock within that bucket. That's the good stuff or all that one yet to take that to the bin yet. Correct. And so that really allows us to minimise the amount of waste going through waste going through the system so it reduces energy consumption and also the means that you're not rehandling material. And then we have another system which fits over a conveyor belt, which essentially closes the loop and also provides the process plan operators with real-time information that they would otherwise get. Things like deuterious material, clay content, those things that go through the plant that actually have a huge impact on plant performance, but are not easy to detect through sort of traditional methods. So there's sort of main touch points that we span across in the mining of. - Okay. - And so really, that the entry point that we go for is what we call digital assay, which allows us to basically speed up on mind sites existing assay program from traditional methods to our method and do it really, really fast. So a lot faster than any traditional method. We literally do our assay in a matter of seconds and we do it out in a mine and provide that information in real time. And we also can do it obviously. A lot cheaper so we don't have as many people going involved and collecting samples, sending them off those sorts of things. And because of the speed that we do it, we can also assay a lot more holes than you would normally do. So a lot of traditional mind sites, they might say, "Oh, we're only gonna. " - We've only got enough money to drill this many holes. - Exactly. Yeah, so that's sort of the usual way that we would enter. A mind site, we go in and start with that and then expand across the mind into those other applications. - And so just on your point there about, you can speed up the process. You can do all of this in real time. How much time can you save mine operators, mine owners in the work that you're doing? Because that's a massive cost at any mind site. - Yeah, correct. So really each mind site can be to some degree unique. So one of the mind sites we work at, they actually don't have an on-site, they're own like a local laboratory, if you like. So it's actually takes them essentially 48 hours from when they collect a sample before they can even get it to the laboratory. And depending on the load of work in the laboratory, yeah, that might be another minimum of a day, two days to turn that around before they get a result. And the problem with that is, yeah, the minds are moving quickly, everyone's capital constrained, so they're trying to make sure everyone's on the clock. - Everyone's on the clock. So making a really smart decision around mind scheduling or mind planning or the geological model is really waiting on this massive bottleneck. I know that some of the major laboratory facilities in Western Australia, they're sort of quoting turner and times of up to seven weeks, even sort of, that's an exploration context. So it's the other extreme of the scenario. But, yeah, so we have everything from up down to one of the mind sites we work at. They have a nine day turnaround from when they collect a sample to when they get the result. And that's really important because they need to optimize their blending plan for shipments that's nine all mine. And if they get that blend plan wrong, it can literally cost millions of dollars. So you've got all these geologists and engineers literally waiting for a week or so and excavators, a quick plan. - Playing dominoes or something. - I'm pretty sure they're busy doing other things, but they're waiting for these results to come into make a decision and can actually have downtime the excavators. So the primary excavators, which cost the tens of millions of dollars, are literally waiting for the schedule to be completed and the blend plan to be done before I can start mining. So there's a huge amount of redundant capacity in the business that's tied up because of these delays. And also, we just take boots off the ground. So our system runs essentially autonomously. So it helps have a lot of-- - It's been done differently. - Yeah. - Geologists and engineers. So we don't take away their job. We just allow them to do it in the office and do it faster than they've done before. So that connection do more and add more value as opposed to being out in the field, collecting all these samples, potentially falling over, hurting themselves and all the things that come with safety exposure on my side. - So is it fair to say, Andrew, that your plot logic technology is providing far more certainty with a more sophisticated level of granularity and certainty around exploration? - Certainly from our perspective, it's what where our value really lies is in that, providing that all body certainty, that all body knowledge that you need to drive various sophisticated decisions to do it faster than you've ever done before. Our main focus, our main audience, if you like, for our product, is actually the mining operators as opposed to the explorers. And the reason for that is because we can drive a decision and support a decision literally within minutes and provide a real time alert to a plan operator that under traditional methods, they wouldn't find out about until they get the end of month to report and their manager says, "Hey, we've had some bad down times here or whatever, "and things haven't gone well." So it actually allows you to get in front of that before it becomes a kind of, and have a very measurable impact in the mind side itself. We also have application in exploration and further downstream. But really our main play is we actually go into the mind side itself and help the mind become a lot more efficient and a lot more sustainable just through, using these new sensors and new technology. - Have you had examples where your technology has been deployed? And the operators thought that for laymen's terms, the real good stuff was in one particular area, but you've saved them because you've run your technology and it's actually somewhere else. - Yeah, so it's absolutely, that happens all the time and conversations having with one of our clients last week is they continually promote this example of this geological model that they have where they said that the all body was essentially stocked that's cut out, the gray cut out, and it just didn't exist anymore. And we were able to, through our technology, be able to say, "Hey, actually, you know what, "there's a huge amount more or here "that you physically have found." - That we found. - You just haven't found because the way that you were doing it is literally worth millions of dollars for them just on that one example. So these guys, every time they do an internal presentation and in amongst their own business, they always bring that slide out, it really stands out, obviously, where this massive amount of all just was otherwise have been written off by the business. - I'm surprised that this technology haven't already existed before you guys can't along. So yeah, it's an interesting one, you know, a big part of where we've sort of got to was really dependent on a lot of deep-powered research and development that we have to do. So the idea is really simple in terms of conceptualizing what you want to do, you scan a whole bunch of rocks with some sensors, write some algorithms, and away you go. But the reality of actually getting it, you know, to work is requires a lot of deep-powered research and development. So Rio Tinto and BHP both attempted to build this technology themselves. - Deep down. - House. Yeah, going back, BHP are now partners with us. So they sort of got to a point and said, yeah, you guys have well and truly gone beyond us, we rather work with you than continue our own. - Why didn't they just buy you? (laughing) - That's a different story, I think. - Yeah, no, okay. - I think in reality, you know, I guess at a philosophical level, we feel that we can have huge impact across the entire industry, which is, you know, expands all producers rather than one. And being an in-house technology that a company develops like a BHP or Rio Tinto is really hard for those guys to actually be able to maintain that technology because they rely on a very small team within a team and they're relying on sensor providers to then provide them with a tech and all those sorts of things that come with it. So it's actually a really hard challenge for a mining company to try to do themselves. And even if they said, okay, we're gonna go with one vendor and that vendor's gonna be exclusive to us. And it also means, yeah, as a vendor or a supplier, you're also limited in your ability to get the advantage of working across lots of different all-bodies and reuse those different all-bodies from different regions and different companies to essentially get, I guess it's a type of network effect where exactly. 'Cause say, okay, every time a new mining company comes and born we do label the data, but we can get some additional information which then benefits all other mining companies. So there's a lot of reasons why, you know, the big mining companies that have attempted this in part sort of got to a point where they got stuck. And our ability to move fast on this is meant that we can sort of do the hard research and then develop commercially and then provide that high quality service back to those clients. Are you doing any work in mines overseas or are you just in Australia at the moment? Here's, we have a deployment in Africa. We also have deployment going into, so possibly going to into Russia in April, depending on what happens here for the next couple of months. And whether or not we're in the future, we're allowed out of the country, but that's important. That's important, or at least be able to get back if we do get out. We also have deployments in South America coming up. We've actually got our first employee starting our Brazilian office, and that person's been deployed out there. Really a lot of interest internationally for what we're doing. Essentially across the go, we see South America as being a really important market for us, which is why we've already put a new employee on over there to help set up that office, and we've got some deployments coming up there later with you. As far as you're aware, is there any other technology similar to yours working in the field at the moment? We're certainly at the pointy end in terms of our technological advantage where we've got to. There's some other small companies that have tried to deploy stuff. We don't know if anything that's currently commercially operating at scale anywhere in the world aside from us, but no doubt is we start getting more and more commercial engagement that will be plenty of people that will try to follow us. Once you've figured out, back in the early days that your technology actually worked, and you were seeing some results on your test mind, your first use of the technology, what was that like? Because I imagine your phone, like Word would have got out, and your phone would have started to ring or your inbox started to jam up with inquiries. Give us a sense of how all of that unfolded. Interestingly, we were, it was our very first deployment where we had a prototype system out in the field, and I was working with my first employee, and he was the postdoc guy at a cowgirl. We were literally set up in this core shed out of a mind site, east of Cowgouli. So you sort of go to Cowgouli, drive to Mayway, turn left and keep driving. It's a pump of a mind site. It's going to run out of road. We literally had this very old cheek computer, it was the only one we could afford for it, sitting on a card table in this core shed in 45 degree, he literally chewing flies and trying to finish writing this algorithm from this data, we sort of collected that day, and then we're supposed to be presenting some preliminary result to the client that day. They weren't expecting us to have presented anything of usefulness because they recognised we were quite clear about how early the tech was, and we literally had this breakthrough moment on the card table, and we showed the client, had to present to the client that afternoon, had another person with me and said, "Yep, show the client, do the demo," which was a 3D visualisation and demo. It literally worked perfectly, gave me the result, and they were literally blown away at one of the guys from this company, literally jumped out of his chair, and said, "That amaze what I would have seen." That was when we had that moment of, yeah, this is going quite impactful. That was a sort of entry point, and obviously to go from POC to commercialisation is a lot of heavy lifting. That next phase has been quite a hard slog since, but very worthwhile, obviously. Let me tell you, many good things happened around a card table over the history of time. Maybe that should be a corporate logo. You've come into the market at a probably a very good time with some positive tailwinds with changes to environmental compliance and the push for ESG investments. Would you agree with that? Yes, so one of the reasons why I actually went and did my PhD back when I did it was because my read of the market was that there would be a time for this technology, but I had a few years, probably, to get ready for that change. We've been looking closely at the markets since I entered it back in the late 90s. Now the time is right for us to explore. It wasn't by accident that we've got to our stage of development at this point of time. It was looking at the market, looking at the changes, looking at when the industry was ready for to bring on this new type of technology and try to time it that way. Something we didn't plan for, of course, was the pandemic, which put a lot of restrictions in our ability to travel, which is probably in some areas slowed down prototype testing because of access to different regions, but by and large we've been able to musk our way through it. So with respect to the future, you're working in the mining industry. Are any other industry or sectors where your technology can be used? We see the next two main areas of interest for us is in agribusiness and also recycling, so supporting the circular economy. The idea of recycling is actually quite similar to mining. We just call it ultra-low grade mining. So we're still looking for us. We're in that waste material. So we see a huge opportunity in that space. As the technology evolves and the cost of application comes to our, we see really good opportunity to help with that recycling piece and minimising landfills, minimising waste going to grow and also recovering usable resources. The other area which sits on the other side of adjacent sites in agribusiness, in terms of crop yield optimisation and being able to make sure that you really understand soil content and moisture content, so sorts of things that can drive agribusiness performance. We see that the technology that we use can certainly be used in that space and there's been a lot of research done by people working with this type of technology in agribusiness and our operating model. As we develop it, we see some good application in that space. For example, you might be growing potatoes and not know exactly the right time to extract the potatoes to maximise you. We can use our technology to actually support that and say, don't dig them yet, they're not quite at maximum yield or come out later on and miss the opportunity if they're at our set up to a point. We see those two areas as being really interesting for us. There's a group of researchers that also apply this technology in pharmaceuticals in terms of optimising the feedstock to produce things like vitamins and other pharmaceuticals. We sort of see that as a long horizon one, but right now we're really focused on mining. It's a really cool thing that we know really well. We know that we can have a huge impact in terms of driving that mine optimisation piece, driving the ability to clean up mines and reduce waste and produce resources that the planet needs and do it in a way that's actually sustainable, environmentally friendly and also others, the businesses to run properly. We're really passionate about getting that piece right first and providing that opportunity for the industry and turn things around. One of the opportunities that we're working at at the moment, there was a federal government grant that was announced just recently with EQ Resources and ourselves here in Queensland. EQ Resources is a tungsten producer out of far north Queensland and the federal government has supported us with EQ to use our technology to help recover old tailings facilities and on stockpiles that allow these tungsten in those waste dumps and tailings that need to be economically recovered for two reasons. One, it helps with a critical mineral that's then identified that tungsten is a critical mineral and would reduce our dependence on China there for tungsten supply, but also clean up these environmental legacies from the 80s and 90s where these mines were shut down and legal. Exactly. We see this model that we're working with companies like EQ to say, "Well, actually what we can do can we help clean up those legacy issues and do it in a way that's profitable for you plus salsa, environmental challenge and then also set you up for long term mine optimisation and if we can do that then we can actually apply that same operating model to a whole bunch of critical minerals across Australia." And how have you funded the company thus far, Andrew? So when I started the company, I bootstrapped it so I had some money saved up, I then remolged my house and then after, yeah, so I have a very supportive partner so if you've had that and then I tried to remolge the house and I was three or four times the best I could do. if I would be on the planet. Yeah, so eventually got to a point where we had been running for about a year or so and obviously this technology is quite intensive in terms of the cost, the reason for the cost area. So sort of tuned through the initial piece of cash quite quickly and then made a call to go and get funding for our company. So I went to North America and spent quite a bit of time talking with intercapitalists, particularly intercapitalists that specialise in deep tech type companies that are working on really hard science problems that have industry application. And yeah, so we've got some funding back in 2019 and then we've progressed through another piece of funding. So we've essentially got venture capital backing out of North America for our, for our firm. Amazing. And just finally, so talk us through the plans for this year for 2022. What has Plot logic got on the agenda for the next 12 months? Yeah, so we've got a massive exciting year that, that, that, essentially we've spent the last few years really setting up for 2022, making sure that the hardware, the embedded software, the applications space, the data management, fireplanes and all the algorithms and everything works and having those key early clients as partners. And this is really about that taking us to global scale and application across lots of different mindsites. We've got a hugely strong sales pipeline and, and at the moment we've got, you know, more clients than we do systems and, you know, we're really pushing as hard as we can to develop and, and produces many of those systems here in, in Australia as we can, so we can get them out and get them deployed globally and really scale up the profitability of the business. We work in a space where the, the technology we're building is, you know, I guess from that Australia's push for modern manufacturing, we've kind of fit within that sweet spot in the sense that the technology that we're building is very high dollar density, it's very sophisticated. So, you know, being able to produce something that is quite important to the industry, quite important to the mining industry, do it, do it here locally and do it with a very high degree of skill is something that we sort of see as being a really important part of our development over the next 12 months as well. Well, right at DownFoaks, the name is PlotLogic. It's the best mining tech company you've never heard of until now. Andrew Job, good luck and thanks for joining us. Thank you, lovely talking to you. [BLANK_AUDIO]