en.Wedoany.com Reported - U.S. Silicon Valley artificial intelligence startup Terra AI announced on June 3, 2026, that it has completed a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was led by renowned venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with strategic participation from BHP Ventures, the corporate venture arm of global mining group BHP. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Terra AI focuses on leveraging an AI-native subsurface modeling platform for resource exploration and development in mining, geothermal, and carbon sequestration sectors. The funds will be used to scale its generative modeling engine, accelerate enterprise-level deployment, and advance software research and development.
Founded in 2023, Terra AI has deep roots in Stanford University's Intelligent Systems Laboratory. The company's founder and CEO, John Mern, holds a background in aerospace engineering from Stanford and previously worked as an AI researcher at Prime Movers Lab. His team brings together multidisciplinary talent, including earth scientists, AI researchers, and engineers. The company previously secured a $3.4 million seed round in 2023, with investors including Khosla Ventures, Rio Tinto, Founders Factory, Storyhouse Ventures, Plug and Play, the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, and Climate Capital.
The company's core technology platform focuses on addressing a key pain point in subsurface resource development: uncertainty. Traditional exploration methods take an average of about 17 years to advance a new discovery to the production stage, and only one in every 1,000 exploration projects ultimately succeeds. Terra AI uses its proprietary generative AI platform to integrate nearly all types of exploration data sources—including geophysical, geochemical, and drilling data—to generate millions of possible 3D subsurface geological models and quantify the uncertainty of each model, enabling teams to assess project economics earlier and more accurately. According to the company's website, the platform can reduce drilling workload by 50% to 60%, improve resource prediction accuracy by 2 to 3 times, and enhance resource definition capability by 2.5 times. Terra AI compares its technology to Google DeepMind's AlphaFold: just as AlphaFold compressed drug development cycles from 15 years to 12 months using AI, the company is pursuing a similar transformation in subsurface modeling and prediction.
Over the past year, Terra AI has validated its modeling capabilities across multiple commercial projects involving copper, gold, rare earth elements, and reservoirs, serving clients including major mining and energy companies such as BHP and Rio Tinto. Rajesh Swaminathan, a partner at lead investor Khosla Ventures, stated that Terra AI is defining a new AI-native approach to exploration, accelerating the development of critical minerals through continuously optimized 3D earth models. Laurel Buckner, Vice President of BHP Ventures, noted that the technology has the potential to improve drilling targeting and accelerate project evaluation, helping explorers concentrate capital on the highest-value project opportunities.
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