Giraffe Bio raises $6.4 million to scale AI-driven copper extraction

Giraffe Bio, an Argentine startup with operations in Chile, has closed a seed round of $6.4 million to scale its biotechnological and artificial intelligence technologies for copper mining. The funding will be used to advance the company's biochemically engineered reagents designed to improve metal recovery rates. Orion Industrial Ventures, a venture capital fund specializing in mining technologies, mineral processing, and industrial decarbonization, led the round. Participating investors included BHP Ventures, the investment arm of the mining company BHP, Twynam, the Argentine fund AIR Capital, and Baruch Future Ventures. The company previously received support from SOSV, which incorporated it into its IndieBio accelerator program in New York.

Giraffe Bio focuses on flotation, the industrial process that separates valuable minerals from waste material, a method responsible for approximately 80 percent of global copper production. Using AI-assisted molecular design and cell-free biology, the company creates biomolecules that selectively adhere to copper. Each reagent is tailored to the specific mineralogy of individual mining operations and integrates into existing chemical circuits without requiring new equipment or living organisms in the mine. According to the company, laboratory validations using real samples showed that its reagents increased copper recovery by three to five percentage points, a gain that translates directly into additional metal tonnage and revenue in the industry.

The startup was founded in 2024 by Alejandro Buffo Sempé, a graduate of Columbia Business School serving as CEO, and Juan Pablo Fernández, a geneticist and biochemist with a postdoctoral background from Yale who serves as Chief Scientific Officer. Fernández previously led the genomic editing area at the biotechnology firm BioHeuris from 2018 to 2023. The founders aim to apply drug discovery methodologies to the mining sector, exploring molecular combinations that are impractical to test manually and adapting reagents to specific deposit conditions. Alejandro Buffo noted that mining companies face increasingly complex minerals while the chemistry used for separation has remained largely unchanged for decades.

Giraffe Bio was the first Latin American startup selected for the Breakthrough Energy fellows program, which provides funding, technical assistance, and access to an international network of specialists to accelerate the commercialization of clean technologies. Over the past year, the company transitioned from laboratory development to validating its technology with international mining companies across various copper mineral types. With the new capital, the company plans to scale production, advance toward larger-scale industrial trials, expand research capacity, and grow its technical and commercial teams.

The market context supports this expansion, as S&P Global projects that global copper demand will reach 42 million tons by 2040, accompanied by a supply deficit of 10 million tons. Copper is a critical input for electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, power grids, and data center infrastructure. While the company's initial development is concentrated on copper, its platform is designed for the recovery of critical minerals in general. Startups Latam reported the story.