Electrification, grid expansion, battery storage, EV manufacturing, AI data centres all depend on critical minerals. For example, Lithium demand is projected to grow more than 400% by 2040 as these industries scale, and copper supply is expected to face a shortage of roughly 10 million tonnes.

Meanwhile, the cost per mineral deposit discovery has more than doubled since 2012. Mine development now takes almost 18 years on average from exploration to production, and a vast amount of public geological data that could help geologists find new deposits has never been processed automatically.

In short, lack of access to critical minerals is set to become a structural constraint on the pace of electrification and the buildout of the energy transition itself. Europe and other Western countries also face a sovereignty issue, as we are currently heavily reliant on other regions, including China, which controls ≈50% of rare earths extraction. 

The gap between mineral demand and discovery capacity is widening, but Lithosquare – a Geology AI platform, built by AI scientists and expert geologists – offers the structural fix it needs.

The Paris-based company, founded in 2024 by mining engineer Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry, makes mineral discovery and exploration up to 10× more efficient, significantly shortening timelines. By enabling more accurate target generation, Lithosquare reduces unnecessary drilling, lowers capital waste, and accelerates the supply of critical metals needed to decarbonise power, transport, industry, and computing. This positions the company as a compelling investment for World Fund.

Lithosquare: the company forging global partnerships to solve the minerals bottleneck

Unlike its competitors, Lithosquare works geology-first. Most AI tools in mineral exploration start by looking for patterns in existing data. By contrast, Lithosquare starts with the science of how deposits form. Its platform is built around deep metallogenic and geological expertise, with a proprietary ontology covering around 20 deposit types, developed and maintained by PhD metallogenists. 

This matters because mineral discovery is not a generic data problem. The most valuable targets are often in greenfield areas, where there may be little or no historical training data. Lithosquare’s platform can reason from geological principles, rather than relying only on statistical similarity to known deposits. That makes its outputs more explainable, more useful to geologists, and harder to replicate. A software-first competitor can build a model quickly, but it cannot easily recreate years of accumulated geological expertise.

This setup gives the company a clear edge – an edge already recognised by the mining partners Lithosquare is already working with across the US, Europe, Africa and Latin America.

The best team for the job - and an asset-light model with real climate leverage

The first thing that struck us about Lithosquare was the team.

Building a successful AI for mineral exploration requires two things that most startups in this category are missing: deep geological expertise and a proven ability to close enterprise sales in complex industrial markets. Lithosquare has both.

CEO Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry is not a first-time founder. He previously bootstrapped Fieldbox, an industrial AI company, to €11 million in revenue and approximately 100 employees, selling into TotalEnergies, SBM Offshore and QatarEnergy. That is a rare pedigree in this category: someone who has navigated complex enterprise sales cycles in the energy sector and built an operationally credible industrial AI company from scratch.

Alongside Aymeric, COO Simon Leclair brings more than 15 years of experience across Eramet and BCG’s Metals & Mining practice. That gives Lithosquare an inside-out understanding of how mining companies assess risk, allocate capital and make exploration decisions.

Behind them sits a team of PhD geologists and AI engineers. Most AI-mining startups are missing either the geology or the enterprise-AI execution. Lithosquare has both, assembled in a way that cannot be quickly copied.

In just two years, this brilliant team has built a commercial model with capital efficiency and long-term upside:

• The company earns near-term revenue through partnership fees and captures long-term value through deposits it helps identify, without taking on drilling risk or capital expenditure. 
• Lithosquare’s model targets meaningful monetisation on a 3-6 year horizon, creating a highly attractive model for scaling across geographies, partners and commodity types while staying asset-light.
• By accelerating the supply of transition-critical metals, including copper, lithium and nickel, Lithosquare can help remove one of the hard constraints on electrification. Lithosquare is not solving a niche geology problem: it is removing a supply constraint that affects every sector of the economy.

Tapping a fast-growing market 

Demand for Lithosquare’s technology and capabilities is also being driven by recent regulatory developments, including Canada's Critical Minerals Strategy and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, which requires that >10% of annual consumption should be extracted domestically.

Lithosquare will use its $25 million funding round, co-led by World Fund and Kindred Capital, with participation from Daphni, Omnes Capital and Ovni Capital, to grow its expert team, continue platform development and expand partnerships across the US, Europe, Africa and Latin America. We are extremely proud to be supporting Aymeric, Simon and the team as they scale.

If you have any questions or are interested in discussing anything further, please get in touch with Nadine at nadine@worldfund.vc.