Ashley Kirwan on starting a data business ‘at the worst possible time’: Exclusive interview at the Mining Legends Speaker Series    

When geologist Ashley Kirwan and her business partner Shastri Ramnath were thinking of starting a consulting company to support miners exploring projects through data in 2012, almost everyone they spoke with said it was a bad idea. 

She had just quit her job and the market wasn’t encouraging for young entrepreneurs. And yet, the co-founder of Orix Geoscience followed her gut.  

“It was like the worst possible time to start a company… at the start of the bear market and nobody knew us either,” she said on June 8 at the Mining Legends Speaker Series, organized by The Northern Miner, The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame (CMHF) and Young Mining Professionals. “But we saw an opportunity specifically in the junior sector. There were still really good people that had great projects, but they had absolutely no team… so they couldn’t really put together their geological information for investors to get the financing,” she said.  “The market opportunity originally was to really support juniors and be the arm of their exploration team.”  

Over the last decade, Orix has managed to shape itself into a one-stop shop that provides exploration services ranging from drone surveys and historical scanning to digititalizing, database compilation, 3-D modelling and field work.  

The company is often hired to manage large datasets or solve geological challenges a team may face, such as creating a drillhole database from historical logs or modelling the geological controls on mineralization in an area.  

The 10-year journey though wasn’t easy and the company initially had to accept shares as payment for a lot of the work they did since there were many juniors who couldn’t afford to pay in cash, and also because Orix was relatively unknown. But a number of these firms, when they did end up getting money, eventually became long-term clients.  

“It was a natural fit for them to turn to Orix and say, well, can we hire you now? You were there for us at our lowest of the low and shared the risk. We want to hire you now to help us execute on our programs,” she recalled during her chat with Northern Miner Group president Anthony Vaccaro at the event.  

While an increasing number of data companies are looking to shift towards artificial intelligence for their analysis, Orix prefers to stick to “first principles.”  

“Before you can even talk about machine learning, AI and all these other things, you need to get your historical data in a format that you can actually do something with,”  Kirwan explained. 

The string of mergers and acquisitions in the industry and people leaving the sector have resulted in “lost boxes of data” that are in warehouses and need to be input into databases. “People have started to realize this… It’s laborious, but we have been doing it for ten years,” she said. 

“We work with massive amounts of data, like hundreds and hundreds of banker’s boxes and map tubes and… it’s intimidating to even touch. But if you have a refined process and you’ve got geologists working on it, then there are ways to expedite that.”   

Geography to geology 

Kirwan, who was named one of the 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining by the Women in Mining UK in 2015, didn’t always want to enter the sector. The Sudbury-based consultant had decided to study geography as a student so that she could travel. However, it was a professor of an elective geology course she had taken in university who inspired her to make the change.  

While pursuing her undergraduate degree she spent her summers doing field and office work for the Ontario Geological Survey in Sudbury and Matachewan. She then held various roles at FNX Mining as a student geologist, exploration geologist and production geologist. Later, she worked with a special projects team focused on complex geological interpretations and 3-D models. (Subsequently, FNX Mining was acquired by KGHM International.) 

After that, she landed a job in Nevada with Bridgeport Ventures as a project geologist in January 2011, before becoming a senior exploration project geologist. She worked in that role from July 2011 until May 2012.  

When Bridgeport was in the process of being taken over by another firm, Kirwan and her colleague Shastri Ramnath decided to start Orix.  

“Because the company was going through a transition, we were either going to go off and do our own thing, or start Orix…we were at a crossroads, we can either find other employment, or we can do this thing that we’ve been talking about for years,” she said.  

Today Orix is one of the rare 100% female-owned companies in the mining sector. About half of its employees are women.  

The recurring Speaker Series invites CMHF inductees and young talents to connect with young mining professionals — in this case, Kirwan was paired with Pierre Lassonde. 

 (To register for the next event featuring Robert Quartermain and Andree St.-Germain, visit https://events.northernminer.com/speaker-series/.)