Can you give a brief overview of DataCloud and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the company?

DataCloud was founded in 2017 as we saw a gap in the market with regards to rock measurements. The company’s general mission is to provide high-resolution images of the sub-surface in real time, whether it is for grade control or improving fragmentation. We install sensors on drills that are able to record acoustic information of the rocks during drilling, and the information then streams to the cloud and is transformed to rock mass intelligence. DataCloud transforms its clients’ drill and blast operations with advanced rock measurement technologies and analytics. The technology of IoT sensors and distributed cloud computing allows us to provide subsurface information to clients very quickly and cost-effectively. The most important information a mining company can have is to know its ore-body, and we can provide this information in real time. 

What is DataCloud’s business model? 

DataCloud’s business model is Platform as a Service (PaaS). Clients pay for a period of time and we then provide all of the sensors, software and computing required. We look at the answers as being driven by what geology the client is working in. Iron ore, metallurgical coal and base metals are DataCloud’s three current focus areas. These areas all need different answers with regards to the orebody to optimize operations downstream, and with a PaaS model, we take care of instrumenting the drills and the processing that is required to deliver these answers. 

With regard to iron ore, one would generally want to know grades and waste boundaries. Within the metallurgical coal area, clients want to avoid coal losses. In terms of base metals, clients want to achieve better fragmentation and increase throughput with lower bomb costs. 

How does DataCloud combine data science expertise with a rock mass evolution platform? 

DataCloud has two core skillsets embedded in its platform: a geoscience team and a coding and AI machine learning team. The AI team interprets and scales information received from the geoscientists in real time. We have developed and built an IoT sensor that is installed on the drills and streams information seamlessly to the cloud platform. The geoscience and engineering team has built this sensor, which can collect the information we need about the rocks and our cloud computing capabilities then enables us to analyze the information in real time. 

DataCloud’s offering is very user friendly as we take care of everything for the client behind the scenes. We can export directly into a client’s block model so that it can be picked up by their workflows downstream with minimal disruption. 

Can you highlight some interesting projects DataCloud has worked on? 

DataCloud has worked on, and is currently focused on, several iron ore projects in the Pilbara region in Australia. We also currently have some iron ore jobs in Québec, and coal jobs in Queensland, Australia. One of the projects we worked on in the Pilbara region was for a large iron ore company that wanted to test our product and services by putting us on the most challenging site that they had with the mission to measure density and shales in a highly altered and heterogeneous formation. We installed DataCloud’s sensors on their autonomous drills, which provided them detailed information of their orebody and we succeeded in answering their questions in real time, even though we were working in such complicated geology.

How does DataCloud’s platform help to reduce operational cost and improve mine productivity?

The platform allows for cycle time improvements as the client gets real time certainty about what their rock mass looks like and are then able to make quicker decisions down-stream. Cycle time improvements leads to both a reduction in operational costs as well as improved mine productivity. 

Do you have a final message for the readers of Global Business Reports?

DataCloud is a traditional startup company and is venture capital-funded. We have recently closed our B-round of financing and will be starting our C-round later in 2019. We have the aim to grow and expand our business as fast as possible. Our objective for the next year is to close our C-round and to expand heavily into other geographies around the world. 

We have a transformative new technology that can offer real-time, high-resolution orebody understanding. This technology is the most important thing that a mining company can have to optimize their operations. It also presents a very good investment opportunity for the investor community to consider.