Mine Vision Systems lands $12.5 million to bring real-time 3D mapping to an industry still working, in many cases, with clipboards and guesswork
There's a certain irony in the fact that mining—an industry built on extracting what lies beneath—has long struggled to accurately see what's directly in front of it underground. Geologists still spend hours at tunnel faces, taking measurements by hand, sometimes in conditions where every minute of exposure carries risk.
Mine Vision Systems, a Pittsburgh company spun out of Carnegie Mellon University's robotics lab nearly a decade ago, thinks it has a better way. The startup announced Tuesday it has closed a $12.5 million Series A round, exceeding its original $10 million target and pulling in capital from both a longtime backer and a newcomer to venture investing.
Rockwell Venture Capital, which first backed the company in 2016, led the round. Joining them: Condire Investors, a Dallas firm that's made its name in public natural resource equities but decided, after extensive homework with mining operators, to take a private bet on Mine Vision's technology.
"We found consistently strong feedback," said Ryan Schedler, co-founder of Condire. The firm didn't just write a check. It ran Mine Vision's FaceCapture system past companies in its mining portfolio first—a due diligence process that speaks to the skepticism capital still encounters when trying to digitize an industry as old and entrenched as mining.
What Problem Are They Actually Solving?
FaceCapture, the company's flagship product, does something deceptively simple: it creates real-time, three-dimensional maps of underground mine faces using a combination of image capture, spatial data, and GPS coordinates. The system is lightweight. More importantly, it plugs into the planning software miners already use—Datamine, Vulcan, Leapfrog—rather than asking operations to rip out their entire tech stack.
That matters more than it might seem. Mining companies move slowly, and for good reason. Procurement cycles drag. New technology gets tested, retested, then tested again. A solution that requires wholesale change faces an uphill battle, no matter how elegant.
Mine Vision launched FaceCapture in February 2023, claiming it could cut geologist time at the face by more than 80 percent. Two days later, Hecla Mining—a New York Stock Exchange-listed producer—signed a multi-year deal to deploy the system at two North American sites. Perhaps that early validation gave CEO Michael Smocer confidence to aim higher than the company's original fundraising goal.
The pitch to operators is straightforward, if ambitious: faster data capture, fewer people in dangerous positions, better decisions about where to dig next. Mine Vision claims most customers see seven-figure returns within a year. Whether that holds across diverse mining contexts remains to be seen, though the company is certainly betting it will.
The Slow March Toward Selling Globally
Throughout 2024 and into this year, Mine Vision assembled what amounts to a global distribution web. ITBox KZ covers Central Asia. RAMJACK, based in Johannesburg, handles Africa and parts of Latin America. TechMinings operates in South America. Hi! Engineers took Australia.
Then, in February, came a partnership with Datamine—one of the incumbent software providers Mine Vision explicitly designed its system to work alongside. Datamine will now market the combined offering to its existing customer base, a move that suggests Mine Vision understood early on that going through established channels beats trying to cold-call miners directly.
It's a pragmatic strategy. Mining is conservative by nature. Partnerships with known quantities lower the barrier to adoption, even if they also mean sharing economics and control.
The company brought on Josh Martin as Chief Revenue Officer last May, a signal that the focus was shifting from pure product development to commercial execution. Bryan Nagy remains CTO. Brett Browning, who founded the company out of his work at CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center, has since moved on—he's now CTO at Stack AV, an autonomous vehicle company. That kind of founder transition isn't unusual in university spinouts, though it does raise questions about continuity.
The Broader Context
Mine Vision's raise arrives at a moment when mining technology is having something of a moment, or at least trying to. KoBold Metals, the mineral exploration startup backed by Bill Gates and other Silicon Valley heavyweights, has pulled in hundreds of millions. Major mining companies are increasing digital budgets, though often incrementally.
But the sector remains unevenly digitized—a patchwork of cutting-edge operations and sites that still rely on decades-old processes. Consulting firms from McKinsey to EY have flagged productivity as a persistent challenge. Labor costs rise. Ore grades decline. Regulatory pressure mounts. All of which creates openings for tools that promise measurable efficiency gains without requiring operators to overhaul everything at once.
Mine Vision's earlier equity raise, an $11.5 million filing with the SEC this past July, brought in 18 investors. Combined with this Series A and initial backing from Gold Fields in 2015, the company now has what Smocer describes as meaningful runway to scale deployments.
The stated plan: expand R&D, deepen integrations with existing mine planning platforms, grow the installed base of FaceCapture systems, and build out customer success teams in key mining regions. Standard post-Series A language, though execution will determine whether the company can convert early adopters into a sustainable business.
"This will accelerate our product roadmap and deliver the decision platform underground mining has been waiting for," Smocer said in a statement. Whether miners have actually been waiting for it—or will need more convincing—is the bet Rockwell and Condire are now making with capital.
What's clear is this: the gap between what mining operations could be and what they often are remains wide. Bridging that gap, one tunnel face at a time, is harder than the technology alone might suggest. But perhaps that's where the opportunity lies.
