Trust before autonomy
Grounding, audit, human-in-the-loop and graduated control. The level is a dial the plant turns, and the reagent scheme is the last thing it moves.
About
Every tonne of metal the energy transition needs passes through a concentrator. The concentrator should not run on memory.
Orebex exists to give every mineral-processing plant a system that runs grinding, flotation, classification, dewatering and optimisation itself, at higher recovery and lower energy and water than a crew can hold by hand, and to capture the craft of a retiring metallurgist workforce before it disappears. The vision is to become the operations layer for the world's mineral processing.
Mission
Move the work of mineral processing itself to AI
So every tonne of ore is concentrated at higher recovery, lower energy and lower water than a human crew can hold by hand.
VisionBecome the autonomous operations layer for the world's mineral processing, where every tonne of ore is crushed, ground, floated and concentrated on Orebex.
Why
Why we are building this
The fact in the control room that started it.
Mineral concentrates are the feedstock of the physical and energy-transition economy: copper, gold, lithium, nickel, zinc, iron and rare earths, concentrated from ore to feed smelters, refineries and battery and grid supply chains. Running a concentrator is still one of the most craft-bound, energy- and water-intensive and value-sensitive processes in heavy industry. Grinding alone can consume the majority of a site's electricity, and a one-percent recovery loss discards millions in metal.
Most plants run this on fixed setpoints, periodic assays, manual froth reads and the craft of a remote, retiring metallurgist and operator workforce. Mill controllers hold a curve. Froth cameras watch bubbles. Analyzers assay grade. APC packages hold levels. Nobody closes the loop.
Why now
- The energy-transition metals boom: copper for electrification, lithium and nickel for batteries, rare earths for magnets
- Decarbonisation and energy-cost pressure, tightening water constraints and structurally declining ore grades
- A severe, remote, retiring metallurgist and operator workforce that cannot continuously optimise a drifting circuit
- Froth-vision AI, online analyzers, particle sensing, edge AI, advanced process control and concentrator twins have matured for production plants
Principles
How we build
The principles we work by.
Compounding data
Every supervised correction trains the system. The closed-loop chain from ore type to grind to reagent to froth to recovery to decision is the asset.
Land narrow, expand
One circuit, one metric, one baseline agreed in writing. Then the concentrator. Then the group.
Cite everything
Every answer from the reasoning layer carries its source. Every action carries its evidence and its envelope.
Isolate tenants
Ore-body data, schemes, models and memory never cross a customer boundary. On-prem and edge for those who need it.
Say what is planned
Figures are design targets until they are measured. Scenarios are labelled scenarios. Standards are cited, not claimed.
Focus
What kind of company this is
For anyone checking eligibility or category.
- An independent startup building original physical-AI software for mineral-processing concentrators
- A product company, not a consultancy, systems integrator, reseller or outsourced development shop; services are limited to deployment, integration and commissioning support for the platform
- Not a cloud provider and not associated with cryptocurrency
- Pre-launch and pre-revenue. Incorporation, headquarters and headcount are not published yet and nothing on this site should be read as claiming them. Leadership biographies are placeholders until verified
Run timeline · scenario
What we are actually building
Every Orebex run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_4b9e27 on Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. P80 held at 148 µm as the blend hardened, froth stability recovered on rougher bank 2 after an air trim, a collector-dose change was approved by the shift metallurgist, predicted recovery held inside the plan, lot C-20931 released with full genealogy.
run_4b9e27
Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend
illustrative scenario
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.shift
SUCCEEDED
0.7 s
Concentrator Orchestrator · Pulled the shift plan from the concentrator MES: copper porphyry blend B-14, P80 target 150 µm, concentrate grade at or above 25% Cu, recovery target per the geometallurgy model, energy and water budgets. Locked the operating envelope for the blend.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
58 s
Concentrator Twin · Simulated 32 candidate grind, air and reagent schemes on the as-run twin for the hardening blend, ranked on predicted recovery, concentrate grade, kWh per tonne and water per tonne. Two candidates breached the thickener bed limit and were discarded.
-
03
grind.setpoint
SUCCEEDED
3 m 40 s
Crush-and-Grind · SAG-1 feed trimmed 3% and cyclone water raised as load and power signatures read a harder feed. P80 from the particle-size analyzer held at 148 µm against the 150 µm target; mill power stayed inside the energy budget.
-
04
froth.read
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Grade-and-Froth · Twelve froth cameras and the online XRF on rougher bank 2 fused at the edge. Froth stability on cells 3 and 4 fell as the blend hardened; predicted recovery drifted 0.4 points below plan. Early warning published to the control agents.
-
05
approve.human
APPROVAL
1 m 12 s
Concentrator Orchestrator · Scheme #7 raises collector dose 6% on rougher bank 2, above the standing reagent scheme. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised on this blend, so the step was held for the shift metallurgist and approved at 07:19:44.
-
06
float.dose
SUCCEEDED
2 m 05 s
Float-and-Reagent · Approved collector dose applied with an air trim of 4% down on cells 3 and 4 inside the envelope. Froth stability recovered within eight minutes; predicted recovery returned to plan with concentrate grade read at 25.6% Cu.
-
07
classify.cyclone
SUCCEEDED
42 s
Separate-and-Classify · One cyclone brought online in cluster 1 as feed density rose with the hardness change, holding overflow size and circulating load inside the plan.
-
08
dewater.thickener
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Thicken-and-Dewater · Tailings thickener TH-2 flocculant dose trimmed as bed pressure rose; underflow density held and overflow clarity stayed inside the water-recovery target.
-
09
optimise.targets
SUCCEEDED
18 s
Throughput-and-Recovery · Whole-plant targets recomputed for the hardened blend: feed rate, P80, air and reagent targets handed to the control agents with recovery, grade, energy and water inside the budget. The losing candidates and their scores are in the run record.
-
10
lot.release
SUCCEEDED
1 m 30 s
Quality-and-Conformance · Concentrate lot C-20931 released: genealogy written (blend, grind record, reagent and air moves, froth and grade reads, approvals, dewatering record, assays as they land) and dispositioned against the concentrate spec with cited evidence for the metallurgist's sign-off.
Market
The market
Figures are the company's own estimates.
$16BTotal addressable spend: mineral-processing automation, comminution and flotation control, froth vision and analyzers, APC, concentrator MES and twins
$4BServiceable with Orebex's product and go-to-market
$250MRealistically obtainable within three years, an estimate
~12%Estimated annual growth of the addressable spend
Team
Who is building it
Orebex is led by its founder and CEO, Robert Ellison, and its CTO, Justin Blake. The profiles below describe what each of them owns and the ground they cover.
Founder & CEO
Robert Ellison
Robert runs the company and owns the design-partner relationships, the pilot structure and the commercial model. He decides which concentrator and which circuit go first, what recovery, grade, energy or water number a pilot is judged on, and who in the plant signs off on the baseline.
Focus: mineral processing and concentrator operations, mining economics, partnerships and go-to-market.
CTO
Justin Blake
Justin owns the plant-edge runtime, the grinding, flotation and froth-vision models, the as-run concentrator twin, and the audit architecture behind every Orebex agent. He is accountable for the bounded, logged write-back into mill, reagent, air and cell controls, and for every agent starting in shadow mode.
Focus: edge computer vision, process control, simulation and digital twins, safety-critical industrial software.
Hiring
The founding roles we expect to open are on the careers page: edge perception, controls and OT integration, simulation, and a founding metallurgist.
Writing
Recent from the blog
One point of recovery
A single point of recovery, lost to the tailings, costs a mine millions a year. Most plants find out from the lab, hours after the ore is gone.
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch
A concentrator does not go from manual to unattended in one step, and the reagent scheme should not be the first thing an agent moves.
Hit recovery before the shift
Metallurgists commit a grind size, a reagent scheme and a throughput target to a shift before they know what the new blend will do. The twin changes the order.
Accelerated computing
Physical AI, at the bank and the mill
Froth changes in seconds and a shift of feed is gone before the assay lands. Perception has to be local, deterministic and fast, so Orebex runs GPU inference at the plant edge and keeps training, simulation and optimisation in the cloud or on-prem.
Edge perception
8 to 24 froth cameras per bank at 15 to 30 FPS plus online XRF, particle-size, pump, level, air, reagent, density and energy streams fused at the plant edge. Sub-250 ms froth inference and local fail-safe through a network outage are the design targets. Jetson Thor is planned.
Model serving
Froth, particle and mineralogy, recovery prediction, time-series anomaly and metallurgy retrieval models behind one orchestrator at the plant edge, 20 to 60 per site as a design target, with versioned canaries and rollback.
Training
Froth segmentation, bubble velocity and stability, grade and recovery prediction, ore hardness, grind-size response, reagent response and metallurgy assistants trained on froth video, analyzer readings, telemetry and metallurgist corrections. 2,000 to 8,000 GPU-hours per commodity model family is the design target once partner data exists.
Concentrator twin
Grinding, flotation, classification and dewatering simulated as-run against as-designed before the shift. GPU comminution and DEM, flotation and geometallurgy simulation is the workload; physics-informed surrogates with Modulus are planned so schemes rank at production cadence.
Synthetic data
Rare froth-collapse, feed-upset, mineralogy-shift, equipment-drift and camera-fouling cases generated and validated against real assay distributions before promotion. 50k to 250k scenarios per commodity and circuit class is the design target.
Optimisation
Throughput, energy, water and reagent allocation and the grade and recovery trade-off solved before the shift and during upset recovery, and handed to the control agents as targets.
Robot sampling and handling
Sampling routes, reagent tote inspection and inspection rovers trained and validated in simulation before they run on site. Assistive until the safety case is proven.
GPU ETL
Daily features from froth, analyzer, mill, flotation, dewatering and genealogy telemetry for retraining, drift detection and recovery, energy, water and reagent benchmarks.
Guardrails
An agent that can move a reagent pump needs a leash
Orebex writes to production equipment. Every capability is scoped, every write is policy-checked against the operating envelope, and every action is written to an append-only audit log the plant owns.
- Bounded action space. Each agent writes only to an explicit tag allow-list, inside per-tag rate and magnitude limits and the operating envelope for the blend.
- Policy engine before every write. Autonomy level, shift, ore type, interlock state, water and tailings constraints and metallurgist policy are evaluated before a setpoint moves.
- Human-in-the-loop gates. Reagent-scheme changes and lot release wait for a named approver. Robotics stays assistive until the site safety case is proven.
- Immutable audit log. Append-only and exportable. Every action records source evidence, the envelope applied, confidence, estimated recovery, grade, energy, water and reagent impact, rollback path, approver and lot scope.
- Hard fallback. Loss of the edge node, the network or a model returns control to the APC or DCS last known-good state. Interlocks are never in Orebex's path, and the edge runs fail-safe through a network outage.
- Tenant and ore-body isolation. Ore-body data, geometallurgy models, reagent schemes and recovery records never cross a customer boundary. On-prem and edge deployment is available for remote sites.
Compliance posture
| Item | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type I | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Planned, first 6 months |
| SOC 2 Type II | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months |
| SSO and RBAC | Console and approvals | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months |
| Environmental and water assurance packages | Recovery, energy, water and tailings evidence | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months; not a certification claim |
| Standards-cited reasoning | ISO, ICMM, tailings and water governance documents | RUNNING In the design, every answer cites its source |
| Per-tenant and ore-body isolation | Ore data, schemes, models, memory | RUNNING In the design from day one |
| On-prem and plant-edge deployment | Remote and IP-sensitive sites | RUNNING Design option |
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions processing managers, metallurgists and sustainability leads ask in the first meeting.
Yes, but only within an explicit tag allow-list with per-tag rate and magnitude limits, inside the operating envelope for the blend, and only at the autonomy level your plant has set. Design partners start in shadow mode, where Orebex writes nothing. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised by a named metallurgist until the ore type is characterised.
Control returns to the APC or DCS last known-good state. Orebex is a supervisory layer on top of the control systems and interlocks you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the circuit to its current way of running, not to a stop. The edge is designed to run fail-safe through a network outage.
Advisory recommendations start from the twin and the shift plan in the first weeks. Froth, grade, recovery and grind-response prediction improve as circuit history and assay-labelled outcomes accumulate per ore type. The compute plan sizes training at 2,000 to 8,000 GPU-hours per commodity model family once partner data exists, a design target.
Only if you choose cloud training. Ore-body data, geometallurgy models, reagent schemes, process models and recovery records are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. A fully on-prem deployment at the plant edge is available for remote and IP-sensitive sites, and federated learning across sites is planned and waits on data-rights agreements.
You are, the same as with any control strategy, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything above your risk threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the evidence, the envelope applied and the human decision.
A paid pilot of 90 to 120 days on one grinding or flotation circuit, scoped to a single wedge with a success metric written into the order form: recovery gain, energy per tonne saved, water reduction or reagent per tonne. The first weeks baseline recovery, energy and water in shadow mode from your own assays and meters.