The focus on domestic manufacturing in the United States has intensified, yet Turner Caldwell, who worked at Tesla for nearly ten years, believes the foundational minerals and metals in the supply chain are overlooked.
This perspective led Caldwell to leave Tesla and establish Mariana Minerals in 2024. The startup aims to grow as a modern mining and refining operation with a primary goal: to introduce more refined metals into the supply chain. To achieve this, the company seeks to automate nearly all facets of mining operations.
A significant advancement in this endeavor involves vehicles. On Thursday, Mariana Minerals revealed a collaboration with Pronto, a company that has developed autonomous systems for haulage trucks and off-road vehicles at construction and mining sites.
This marks Pronto’s first agreement since being acquired by Atoms, a new robotics venture led by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. This acquisition reunites Kalanick with Pronto founder Anthony Levandowski, known for his work on Google’s self-driving project and the creation of Otto, which Uber bought in 2016.
Through this partnership, autonomous haulage trucks will start operations next week at Copper One, a once-idle copper mine in Utah that Mariana acquired last year. The financial details of the agreement remain undisclosed.
Caldwell emphasized in an exclusive interview with JS that the partnership extends beyond just autonomous trucks. Pronto’s autonomy technology will integrate directly with Mariana’s proprietary MineOS software, enabling automatic truck dispatch and route coordination without human intervention.
This integration reflects Caldwell’s comprehensive vision for future mining operations, leveraging multiple systems using reinforcement learning to automate and synchronize activities across the entire mine.
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“The big Western mining companies look exactly like Ford and GM before Tesla. They look a lot like NASA before SpaceX. They look a lot like the big defense primes before Anduril,” he said. “The rate at which software is up-taken and technology is up-taken into the space is fundamentally set by the operating teams who don’t really have incentive to change how they operate, right? If they’re able to make their KPIs, you know, the spreadsheets, the walkie talkies, the paper reporting — it works just fine.”
Caldwell believes this approach constrains a mine’s productivity and leaves potential efficiencies untapped, viewing it as an existential issue.
“Because Western mining companies don’t build a lot of net new infrastructure, the talent pool hasn’t been actively attracted to it, and so the labor force is diminishing,” he said. That means mines are going to be stuck trying to do more with less. Caldwell sees Mariana’s software-first approach as the solution to this problem.
While this approach seems advantageous for Mariana, it could also benefit other mines. Caldwell mentioned that selling Mariana’s coordination software could be an option, especially after it proves effective.
However, Caldwell clarified that this was not the initial focus. He believes the “core business should be selling metal.”
“The company is the coordination layer. And so, if you’re doing that, like, at that point, you might as well go and vertically integrate, and go down into making the metal, instead of just selling software,” he said. “I think SpaceX would not be a very large company selling [rocket] re-landing software to NASA.”
Caldwell argues that managing the mine is essential for the reinforcement learning process, as it allows for enhanced control and data accuracy. This could eventually lead to decisions that humans currently find challenging to make. He compared this to how AlphaGo, a software developed by DeepMind, started making unforeseen moves after extensive training.
Despite the focus on automation, Caldwell insists he does not intend to eliminate human roles in mining operations. He, like others in the industry, believes that Mariana’s approach can actually expand the shrinking talent pool.
“Part of this is a labor cost reduction, but that’s not really the goal,” he said. “The goal is actually enabling more productivity with the constrained labor pool that we have. Automation, and autonomy, is going to create more jobs, because we will have more mines that are operating.”
