Statkraft Ventures invests in Open Mineral – a global digital trade platform for base metal commodities

Statkraft Ventures participates in a $33 million financing round of Switzerland-based Open Mineral AG, an online exchange for physical commodities, together with lead investor Mubadala Capital and with additional participation from Lingfeng Capital as well as existing investors Emerald Ventures and Xploration Capital. Open Mineral will use the capital to continue to accelerate its growth, solidify its physical supply chain merchant activities, and advance its leading position in digitizing metal raw material trading. The metal raw commodities market is a $200 billion space, with most of its participants still trading via paper documents.
 
Alexander Küppers, Managing Director at Statkraft Ventures, explains the reason for investing in Open Mineral: “The team at Open Mineral has built a scalable, global platform for trading metal raw materials. These materials are crucial ingredients for the green energy transition, e.g. for the lithium-ion battery value chain. We are confident that Open Mineral will play an important role in further increasing efficiency, transparency and ESG practices in the base metal market.”
 
“The metal trading industry’s future is in digital data and analytics enabling market participants to communicate faster and make quicker, and more data-driven decisions”, said Boris Eykher, CEO & Co-Founder of Open Mineral. “Just as eBay revolutionized retail purchasing by bringing more choices to buyers and sellers, we aim to do the same for physical commodity producers in a curated, trusted environment of the Open Mineral platform. Our goal is to give end-to-end service, more information, transparency, and fair market terms to miners and smelters so they can make better decisions and ultimately become more profitable.” 
 
Open Mineral’s platform has registered over 900 metals and mining companies across the world. The company has developed proprietary pricing algorithms to drive broader value creation through the commodity supply chain.

Open Mineral is actively working with third-party providers to incorporate ESG metrics across the sell-side (supplier product offers) and buy-side (downstream processing) and developing the architecture to facilitate concentrate swaps in the prevailing costly freight environment. The company has also developed automated blending/smelter material optimization solutions enabling more efficient, informed, and profitable trade of physical metal raw commodities. These steps are crucial in supporting the metal and mining industries’ ambition of transitioning to a lower carbon world and provide an additional lever/certification for the transparency and footprint of the trades.