Here’s an awkward fact about the clean-energy transition: it is staggeringly metal-hungry. Batteries, grids, motors and turbines all run on lithium, copper, nickel and rarer minerals, and the world does not currently have enough discovered, permitted, producing deposits to meet the demand everyone is forecasting. Lithosquare, a French company founded in 2024, raised a $25 million seed to attack the discovery half of that problem with AI.
The round drew Daphni, Kindred Capital, Omnes Capital, World Fund and OVNI Capital, a syndicate that mixes generalist European venture with climate-specialist money, which is the right combination for something this far upstream. The pitch is straightforward: combine machine learning with geological expertise to compress the painfully long timeline from initial exploration to actually finding a viable deposit.
Mineral exploration is one of the slowest, most failure-prone processes in industry. If AI can even modestly shorten it, the value is enormous, because everything downstream of a battery starts with a hole in the ground.
That timeline is the whole game. Mineral exploration is notoriously slow, expensive and prone to dead ends, most prospects never become mines. Shave years off the search, raise the hit rate even slightly, and you’ve created value across the entire supply chain that the energy transition depends on. It’s a deeply unglamorous problem dressed in deeply fashionable technology, which is often where the durable businesses hide.
The European angle is the same one running through this whole month of deep-tech raises: critical-minerals security is now a strategic obsession in Brussels, and a French startup using AI to find the metals Europe doesn’t want to import from elsewhere is squarely aligned with where policy and capital are both pointing. Lithosquare is a seed-stage bet, with all the uncertainty that implies. But it’s pointed at a genuinely large problem, from France, with real money, and that’s the pattern worth tracking.