Open Mineral raises $33 million in Series C Funding
Open Mineral, a startup that is looking to bring in increased transparency into worldwide commodity trading, has announced that it has raised $33 million in its Series C funding round.
The round was led by Mubadala Investment Company and they were joined by other investors like Statkraft and LingFeng Capital. The company has said that these new funds would be used to improve its merchant activities in the market that is valued at over $200 billion but is still very far from being digitized. This is where the company hopes to bring in a change and make the platform fully digital and onboard several metal and mining companies from around the world. The company says that it has already onboarded over 900 such companies and the ease of using the digital platform, couple with customized pricing algorithms is expected to push more companies onto the platform in the future.
Boris Eykher, CEO and co-founder of Open Mineral, said: “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. 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.”
Open Mineral also says that it would be looking to push “green” ESG metrics on its buy and sell-side as the mining companies and the associated platforms come under increased scrutiny over their contribution to the destruction of the ecosystem and global warming. The company hopes that such measures would help to boost the credentials of this sector about being “green” and helping to support the environment.
Faris Al Mazrui, head of Russia and CIS Investments at Mubadala, said: “Open Mineral is disrupting the commodity trading business by leveraging data analytics technology. Buyers and sellers of base metal commodities can tap into a unique and proprietary data hub to trade more efficiently and capture upside.”
This would indeed be a huge move if the company can achieve its goal of digitizing the whole commodity trading market as the use of paper, as is done right now, is a big drawback in terms of transparency and ease of doing trading.
