Gates, Bezos-backed KoBold Metals raises US$537M in race for critical minerals

KoBold Metals has raised US$537 million in its latest funding round as it seeks to become a key player in critical minerals needed for the energy transition.

Supported by investors such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the company said this week its Series C funding round valued KoBold at nearly US$3 billion. To date, KoBold has raised US$1 billion.

Privately-held KoBold aims to produce at least 300,000 tonnes of copper per year by 2030 at its US$2-billion Mingomba flagship project in Zambia. The company is to begin sinking the mining shaft in the first half of 2026 for what may become the country’s largest copper operation.

About 40% of the new capital would be spent on developing existing projects into mines, with the Zambian copper project taking “the lion’s share of that,” KoBold’s co-founder and CEO, Kurt House, said in a release. 

New investors

The round was co-led by new investors Durable Capital Partners LP, based in Maryland with some US$30 billion under management, and a pair of funds from Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price which manages US$1.7 trillion.

Other first-timers are New York-based StepStone Group which controls US$176 billion and WCM Investment Management from near Los Angeles with US$96 billion under management. 

The financing included participation from existing KoBold investors Andreessen Horowitz Growth (Netscape creator Marc Andreessen), Bezos’ venture capital firm BOND and his July Fund, Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, Earthshot Ventures (former Google executive Tom Chi), Norwegian state energy company Equinor, Mitsubishi of Japan, and New York-based Standard Investments. 

AI exploration

KoBold uses artificial intelligence to find deposits of minerals such as copper, lithium, and nickel. The technology can locate resources that may have eluded more traditional geologists and can help miners decide where to acquire land and drill, it said. 

In February, the company teamed up with Midnight Sun Mining (TSX-V: MMA) to explore Dumbwa, one of four targets on its Solwezi copper project in the heart of the Zambian copperbelt. The project lies just a few kilometres from First Quantum Minerals’ (TSX: FM) Kansanshi mine, Africa’s largest copper mining complex.

The Dumbwa target KoBold is to explore is on Solwezi’s southern part and features a 20-km-long soil anomaly with a peak grade of 0.73% copper.

Drill highlights from Dumbwa include:

• 13 metres of 0.63% copper, including 3 metres of 1.3% copper, starting from 85 metres downhole in drill hole DC15-03;
• 12 metres of 0.65% copper, including 6 metres of 1.06% copper, starting from surface in drill hole DCAC-39;
• 13.5 metres of 0.77% copper from 5 metres in drill hole SDDD06;
• 16 metres of 1.24% copper from 164 metres in drill hole SDRC13; and
• 15 metres of 0.71% copper from 34 metres in drill hole SDRC05.

Battery metal quest

KoBold began its quest for battery metals almost five years ago in Canada after it acquired rights to an area in northern Quebec, just south of Glencore’s (LSE: GLEN) Raglan nickel mine, where it detected lithium.

The startup is now advancing 60 active projects spanning four continents: Africa, North America, Australia and Asia. Using artificial intelligence, KoBold aims to create a “Google Maps” of the Earth’s crust, focusing on finding copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium deposits.

It collects and analyzes multiple data streams — from old drilling results to satellite imagery — to better understand where new deposits might be found. Algorithms applied to the data collected determine the geological patterns that indicate a potential deposit of cobalt, for example, which often occurs naturally alongside nickel and copper