Through the Lens of a Startup: BattleBorn and the Paradigm of Innovation in Mining
A Snapshot into BattleBorn from Slingshot Aerospace
Originally published by Ross Chesnick, Director of Commercial Strategy, Slingshot Aerospace
In a packed co-working space just outside of downtown Las Vegas, an audience of mining professionals, interspersed with members of the startup and tech community, came together to shape the future of an industry. During a breakout session, we all cracked a smile in response to a mining manager’s statement. “Mining has been one of the slowest industries to embrace new technology. However, there is a bit of an opportunity now, and the iron is hotter than it has been in the past.” This comment was the perfect verbiage to describe the event that hosted it, BattleBorn. As a product of the combined efforts of Barrick, Unearthed, Switch and Cisco, BattleBorn was created to stimulate discussions on the future of mining.
Through a series of hackathons, exhibitions and speaking sessions, BattleBorn created an environment where startups and new technologies had a unique opportunity to garner feedback with the decision makers of the mining community. Speaking from the perspective of a startup, this was an invaluable moment where we could not only shake the hands of industry thought leaders, but also to identify the paint points and tangible hurdles for any new mining technology. For us at Slingshot Aerospace, this interaction and information have been the impetus to further pursue this vertical.
About Slingshot Aerospace
Slingshot Aerospace, a Techstars 2017 alumni, is a signal processing analytics and AI service provider. To elaborate, we ingest and analyze aerial and satellite imagery to unlock deep intelligence within the data. This intelligence allows us to auto-detect and monitor changes to infrastructure, flooding, vegetation, and a variety of terrestrial anomalies over time. In putting these capabilities to the test, and what was one of our proudest moments as a company, Slingshot supported Team Rubicon and BAE in disaster response efforts for both Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The output of Slingshot’s analysis provided a comprehensive understanding of the extent of the flooding and its severity, ultimately assisting search and rescue operations of first responders. Slingshot also used its algorithms to quickly identify forward relief and triage staging areas close to non-flooded roadways and optimal hospital routes.
This application in disaster response was just one instance that leveraged the scale, speed and predictive power of our cloud native ecosystem. In just this past year, we’ve entered into contractual agreements with some of the biggest names in defense and are in current talks with stakeholders in several other verticals, including mining, real estate, financial services and civil/county offices.
Leveraging Startups to Address Pain Points
As my colleague and I stood behind the Slingshot booth at the Startup Exchange, the final day of BattleBorn, we were eager to network with the mining professional attendees. As they visited our space, the more insight they fed us. Some of it was feedback on our tech, but much of it, and more importantly, was identifying their pain points. Time and time again, mine managers and innovation directors pointed to the recurring problems underlying the risks associated with tailings dams. Given the environmental, social and economic hazards posed by the potential failure of these storage structures, we learned that the onus is on the mining manager to ensure that such a rupture never occurs during the full lifecycle of a site. While in-situ monitoring solutions do exist to address this concern, which require periodic on-site visits to the dams, mining professionals at the event emphasized the growing need for scalable remote sensing capabilities. This includes leveraging satellite imagery, with varying revisit rate requirements, and computer vision capabilities that can automatically spot anomalies to these earth-filled embankments. As we were told, any predictive metric on a potential dam failure would be hugely valuable. This key takeaway wasn’t just an industry insight, but a market opportunity for us at Slingshot, aligning perfectly with our core capabilities. Attending BattleBorn was paramount to the discovery of this business application.
Looking Forward
In stark parallel to the mine manager’s earlier quote, the mining industry may not be known as an early adopter of advanced tech, but events like BattleBorn are pushing this paradigm. Such a shift is widening the window for innovative technology providers, like Slingshot Aerospace, to enter the market. We look forward to our continued engagement with companies like Barrick, and any other mining operation looking to embrace this new wave of tech savvy, responsible mining.
Interested in learning more about Slingshot Aerospace? Feel free to visit us at www.slingshotaerospace.com or email us atross@slingshotaerospace.com for more information.
