Investment Notes: Mint Innovation | Blackbird
Summary
Were excited to share our investment in the Series B round of Mint Innovation, a Kiwi-founded company that has developed a low-cost, low impact process using inexpensive chemicals and naturally sourced microbes to separate precious metals from electronic waste.The most abundant source of precious metals like gold, palladium and copper is in the urban mine. That is, waste materials from cities such as scrap electronics, not ores deep in the earth that need to be mined at great environmental, humanitarian and financial cost to extract single digit parts per million of resource. Small electronics typically contain ten to a hundred times higher concentrations of precious metals than conventionally mined ores.Mint was founded by Dr Will Barker who was an instrumental early employee at the cleantech Kiwi unicorn, Lanzatech, which uses microbes to turn waste gas from steel plants into ethanol. When Lanzatech re-domiciled to Chicago, Will and several other key technical talent decided to remain in New Zealand and joined forces to work on the challenge that would lead to founding Mint Innovation.At Blackbird, we love to invest in science non-fiction, bold and transformative technologies that can be achieved on relatively small amounts of capital and venture-like timelines.The Mint team has been extremely sparing with their resources. The vision is for every 5M+ city to have its own biorefinery, turning e-waste into precious metals for the local economy, or for other regions to have a hub and spoke model feeding into a regional biorefinery.Although the initial focus is on extracting gold, copper and palladium, ultimately Mint is a bio-mining platform for recovering industrially important metals from many different types of feedstocks, from e-waste to mining residues, using standard industrial chemicals, no carbon emissions and cyanide free.