Durin is a mining technology startup building automated drill rigs to dramatically cut the cost and time of mineral exploration in the US. Founder Ted Feldmann grew up around mining, became passionate about critical minerals supply chain security as a teenager, and worked at MP Materials before starting Durin in April 2024 during his junior year at Georgia Tech. The company’s core thesis is that exploration drilling has seen almost no major innovation since 1958, remains extremely expensive ($250/meter in the western US), relies on an aging workforce (half of US mining workers expected to retire by 2030), and is ripe for automation that can cut costs 80–90%.
The problem with exploration drilling
Drilling is the bottleneck in mineral discovery. After broad surveys (soil sampling, aerial geophysics), companies must physically drill to recover core samples and determine if a deposit is economic. This is slow, capital-intensive, and done in serial cycles—raise money, drill, analyze, repeat—often over 15 years in the US (longer than permitting a nuclear reactor).
Most exploration projects fail. Somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000 projects become a mine. Exploration historically returns only 98 cents per dollar invested. Companies are capital-constrained, retail-investor-dependent, and incentivized to keep marginal projects alive rather than kill them quickly.
The technology is stagnant. Diamond core drilling was introduced in 1893. The major innovation was the wireline system in 1958, which allowed retrieving core samples without pulling up the entire drill string. Today’s rigs are safer and more efficient but fundamentally unchanged. OEMs are not incentivized to automate: they sell equipment to drilling contractors (not exploration companies), make money on maintenance and spare parts, and focus R&D on electrifying mine-site equipment rather than exploration rigs.
Labor is 50–60% of drilling costs. A typical rig crew has a driller (monitoring RPM, weight on bit, fluid pressure in real time) and helpers handling rods, retrieving cores, and mixing drilling fluid. The workforce is aging out, with less than 5% under 30.
How Durin’s rigs work and the roadmap
Durin is building programmable, remotely operated drill rigs with an API for data and commands. Their first full-scale rig (17 feet tall, ~6 tons, skid-mounted, capable of 300m depth with HQ core) was built in ~3.5 months and is designed to be remotely operated over Starlink—believed to be the first remotely operated drill rig of its kind. It will initially run with human operators to generate revenue while the team collects data to build autopilot software.
Automation is being layered in step by step. A robotic rod-handling arm is in development (testing expected May 2025). Next: automating the overshot system for retrieving inner tubes and core samples, then mud mixing and rod greasing. The goal is to go from 3–4 people per rig down to 2–3 people managing multiple rigs.
The next rig (crawler-mounted, 1000m depth) will be the revenue workhorse. Materials cost ~$400K–$500K per rig. Each rig can generate $10,000/day in revenue at current market rates, with operating costs around $5,000/day ($3,000 of that labor). Durin aims to drop labor to ~$1,000/day through automation. The plan is to have five of these larger rigs built between seed and Series A, targeting mass manufacturing by mid-to-late 2026.
Durin wants to become a one-stop shop for exploration data. Beyond drilling, they plan to add on-site core scanning (hyperspectral, XRF), downhole geophysics, and sample prep (crushing, assay preparation) in a single trailer—reducing shipping, separate contractors, and turnaround time. The analogy is airplane Wi-Fi: include it by default at minimal marginal cost.
Market and business model
Global mineral exploration drilling is ~$78 billion/year (~$1B in the US, ~$2B in Canada). Durin’s immediate market is drilling services, selling to exploration and mining companies.
Pilot customer: Scott Discoveries, an exploration company with projects in Idaho and Nevada, introduced through a founder network. First holes expected late March 2025.
Drilling is cyclical (more activity in summer, especially in Canada), so Durin is building software to load-balance rigs geographically—moving equipment from Canada in summer to Arizona/Nevada in winter—and offering discounted “fill-in” holes to maximize uptime.
Durin believes they can compress exploration from 15 years to 3–5 years by enabling larger, well-capitalized companies to drill continuously and kill bad projects faster, and by helping smaller companies do more within each capital-raising cycle.
Policy tailwinds
Trump’s March 20, 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to identify stalled mining projects, expedite permitting, and leverage the Development Finance Corporation and Export-Import Bank to fund domestic production and secure foreign feed for minerals the US lacks (e.g., bauxite, cobalt).
The Biden administration’s Defense Production Act and Inflation Reduction Act funded some exploration directly—e.g., Talon Metals received $20 million for its nickel project in Minnesota. Feldmann argues this is exactly where government money should go: late-stage feasibility drilling, where projects are de-risked but retail investors are uninterested.
Feldmann’s view: The best time to start Durin was 10 years ago, but the current political environment is the most supportive of US mining in decades.
Brand, hiring, and culture
Durin is deliberately building a “SpaceX of mining” brand to attract top engineering and drilling talent to an industry perceived as dirty and slow. The team put up a billboard across from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne reading “You can’t have rocket science without rock science”—it generated internal buzz at SpaceX and inbound interest.
Hiring process: Talk to hundreds of candidates, prioritize genuine interest in the mining problem and extreme work ethic over domain expertise. Meet in person, test how they react to feedback, and ensure they mesh with the small team (5 full-time at time of recording).
Feldmann’s pitch to drillers: Work for a company that’s building the future of your job, with a brand no other drilling contractor has.
Background on MP Materials and rare earths
MP Materials operates Mountain Pass, California—the only rare earth mine in the US, ~45 minutes from Las Vegas. The deposit has been known since the 1940s/50s. It went through multiple owners (Chevron, Molycorp) and bankruptcies (Molycorp’s separation technology failed post-GFC).
Jim Litinsky bought it out of bankruptcy in 2017 for $25M, brought in a Chinese technical partner (Shanghai Resources, ~8–9% owner) because the US had lost rare earth processing expertise. MP is now building its own separation and magnet manufacturing capabilities to keep rare earths in the US.
Rare earths are chemically similar and extremely hard to separate. Neodymium and praseodymium (light rare earths, used in EV magnets) are often not even separated from each other. Dysprosium and terbium (heavy rare earths) are an order of magnitude rarer but critical for magnet performance.
Feldmann’s personal path
Family in mining and manufacturing (father and uncle worked in coal and other sectors). First internship at 17 with Iperionex, a mineral sands exploration company in Tennessee, where he mapped the titanium supply chain and discovered defense-critical minerals flowing through Russia and China.
Worked at MP Materials for nearly two years during college (remote and in person), building software to optimize rare earth magnet compositions.
Got into the industry through conferences: At 19, attended a rare earths conference in Las Vegas, talked to an MP Materials engineer, and landed a job by coincidence. Later attended a mining AI course in Montreal that turned out to be entirely in French.
Influenced by Peter Thiel’s Zero to One (read in early 2020), YC Startup School, and the LA/Elsagundo hard tech ecosystem. Decided to incorporate Durin during his junior year after the Decelus accelerator, rather than waiting to graduate. His father drove to Atlanta to convince him to finish his degree at Georgia Tech while starting the company.
