Resources

Company and technology resources

• Ideon company profile
• DOE Explains… Muons (U.S. Department of Energy)
• TRIUMF (Canada’s particle accelerator center)
• Ideon and Orano Deploy World’s First Borehole Muon Tomography Solution (Techouver article)

Education/News/Networking resources

• Strictly VC
• Vancouver Tech Journal
• Techouver

Guests

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Gary Agnew, CEO and Co-founder, Ideon Technologies Inc

Kim Lawrence, VP, Talent and Customer Experience

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:
This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I’m your host, Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS.

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Ideon Technologies’ Gary Agnew, CEO and Co-founder, and Kim Lawrence, VP of Talent and Customer Experience. Ideon uses energy from supernovas–called muons–to help create 3D maps of critical minerals needed for the clean energy transition.

I’ll ask Gary and Kim to explain their technology and how it can accelerate the energy transition with respect to mining for minerals like cobalt and lithium. I’ll also ask them how they’re using artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve mining efficiency and reduce its environmental impact. And, as usual, I’ll ask them to share some advice for those interested in working at the intersection of business and climate change.

Here’s my interview with Gary Agnew and Kim Lawrence of Ideon Technologies.

Gary and Kim, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Gary Agnew:
Thank you Mike.

Kim Lawrence:
Thanks for having us.

Mike Toffel:
Let's start with a little bit about your background and your introduction. Can you each describe who you are and how you got there? Gary, maybe we could start with you?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, sure. Gary Agnew, CEO and co-founder at Ideon Technologies. I've spent most of my career, in one fashion or another, serving the global mining industry. Previously, I worked for the world's largest capital equipment dealer, a company called Finning, straight from school and progressed through the company over a 20-odd year trajectory. And then in 2018, I decided it was an opportunity to do something perhaps more purposeful with the next phase of my career. And so left the comfort of a corporate organization and switched gears and jumped into a startup.

Mike Toffel:
Great, and Kim?

Kim Lawrence:
Kim Lawrence, I'm the VP of Talent and Customer Experience at Ideon, and I've been there since 2020. I am an arts grad and a business grad. I attended what Canadians lovingly called The Harvard of the North, Queens in Ontario. And so my career in the beginning started in high-tech, so mostly satellite remote sensing technology and then also into the graphic arts tech space. Then I took a 15-year deviation to work inside research universities, and that involved a lot of looking at new tech, spinning things out, working at business schools from the inside. And so when I was at the end of that trajectory, decided to go startup. Wanted velocity, wanted quick decision and action, and so I got that in spades.

Mike Toffel:
And how did you get here to Ideon? How did you find the company?

Kim Lawrence:
It's all about networking. So one of the original co-founders of Ideon was a former colleague of mine from my satellite remote sensing days, and so we stayed in touch over 25 years or so and reconnected.

Mike Toffel:
Neat. And so, Gary, give us an elevator pitch for the company, what does it do?

Gary Agnew:
So we use the energy from supernova explosions in space to image down to a kilometer beneath the earth’s surface. And we use that technology to help the global mining industry discover and characterize minerals in the earth's crust. And so quite a timely commercialization of this technology, given the global shift to renewable energy, and the requirement for a 500% increase in a range of critical minerals that will enable the energy transition.

Mike Toffel:
That sounds like kind of science fiction in some ways.

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, it does sound like science fiction, but can I assure you and your audience that it is very real. Maybe I double click on the kind of high level positioning statement? Yeah. We're using subatomic particles called muons, and muons are very much like an electron, but much heavier. The neat thing about muons is they travel to earth in straight lines of almost the speed of light. There's one passing through yours in your audience's heads every second.

And as those muons penetrate the earth, they are slowed down and ultimately decay based on the density of the mass that they are traveling through. And that's really an important crux to our technology. And what we have developed the ability to do is measure muon intensity and directionality in the earth. And from that we're able to then produce 2D radiographic images just like an x-ray and 3D representations of density, very analogous to CAT scans in medical imaging. And so that's really at a reasonably high level how the technology works, how we use those particles and how we create 2D and 3D imaging of the earth.

Mike Toffel:
Let's talk about how you, as a co-founder, came up with the idea. Where did the idea come from for Ideon? Where did the technology come from? A little bit about the backstory of the company itself?

Gary Agnew:
Yes. I won't claim any credit for the original idea, Mike. The idea had germinated and developed quite a lot before I got involved with the business. The origin story of Ideon was actually a project geophysicist working in Canada in the mining industry had read about muon tomography, being used in Volcanology.

And so a gentleman called Brian Powell posed a question to Canada's national particle physics laboratory, an organization called TRIUMF. The question he posed was, "Could this technology be used to mineral explorate? And that really kicked off what was an initial desktop research assignment that turned into a proof of concept that turned into almost a decade of commercial field trials with the major mining companies, and really that took us to around 2020, the time when Kim and I got involved as the kind of nascent technology and an R&D unit was looking to stretch his legs and become a commercial entity.

And so we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Canadian government's funding of advanced and fundamental science and the role that TRIUMF played in helping this pledging technology really be able to do the commercial trials to prove the efficacy of the technique over that time. But also we owe a debt of gratitude to TRIUMF for recognizing that there was a much bigger commercial opportunity for this technology and therefore the business was spun out of the lab from the back end of 2018, really to give it the freedom and to be able to hire the talent. You work with the mining industry, get investment to be able to take a proven technology and turn it into an industrialized solution for the market. And so quite a neat journey from government lab to commercial entity.

And so the reason I'm a co-founder in the business is because there was some structural issues that we had to navigate and one of the implications of that was we had to re-found and restructure the business. And so we did that in 2020 and hence I become a co-founder with the original co-founders at that time.

Mike Toffel:
Got it. And Kim, you had some experience already in this broader space before you came in. What was your first take when you heard about this new technology and how it was being deployed?

Kim Lawrence:
I did. Confession, when I was a young girl, I had aspirations of being a nuclear physicist. I'd always been fascinated with space. And so earlier in my career I really gravitated towards that and was part of the launch of the first satellite in the radar sat spectrum, which was the first time that humans had seen the earth through clouds in many areas of the world. I'm a sucker for cool stuff from space, so it's pretty unbelievable, but I've seen evidence of how it works and it's pretty spectacular.

Mike Toffel:
So let's talk about mining and the environmental impacts of mining, because I think most folks, if they're hearing, "Oh, there's a new technology to make mining more efficient", they'll be like, "Well, this doesn't sound like a particularly attractive thing for the environment." Often mining has lots of problems, including pushing toxins into the environment, into waterways, lots of mining involved in the fossil fuel industry, which converts carbon from under the soil into our atmosphere. But you're trying to turn this around and say, "No, no. There's opportunities here to make mining more efficient in ways that will, I think, be a win-win. More cost-effective, but also more environmentally beneficial." Can you tell us that story?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, sure. And maybe the first thing that I'm not sure the average person in the street recognizes, is that mining is one of two fundamental industries that everything that is produced on Earth come as a result of, because products are either grown or the materials are mined in order to produce them. And so a 40,000-year old industry, something that the human race had been engaged in through all of that time, and without question, I think as we look back over the last decades and the last centuries of mining, there's a lot that could have been better, could have been cleaner, could have been a different impact on the environment.

For me, what I'm energized by and really focused on is the shift that this industry is in the middle of making. And so the leaders of this industry recognize they have to play a different role in the future, they have to be a cleaner and more societally orientated role and very much from what's traditionally been a dirty industry, there's the opportunity for mining to become a critical industry that is about enabling the transition to renewable energy.

And so from a difficult past in many regards, Mike, this industry has got a hugely exciting future. It's a large global industry, multi-trillion dollar industry. It's got a level of complexity that requires great talent in the sciences, in technologies, in geology, in order to effectively be able to understand, "How do we extract the minerals with a minimal impact on the earth and our environment, but extract those minerals in a way that is a sustainable approach to enable this, the planet and the human race, to move forward?"

Mike Toffel:
So let's decompose this and talk about costs and environment one at a time. So on the cost side, the odds of the current sort of business as usual approach to searching for metals, and we're talking about things like lithium and cobalt and nickel, things that are needed for the energy transition for batteries, for example. What's the current technology prior to yours and that's used to identify areas where folks try and mine, and what's the success rate of that, and then how does that compare to your technology?

Gary Agnew:
Yes. There's a couple of different technologies the industry uses today. There's a range of geophysical techniques and geochemistry techniques, but once you get to an area of interest, there could be many square kilometers, drilling becomes the predominant way the industry searches the earth. And to give you an example, this year 150 million meters of drilling will happen in the search for and the characterization of minerals in the earth. And so drilling is a 150-year-old technology that the industry has relied heavily on to do its expiration. If you look at prospective sites that could have minerals in, to those that turn into operating mines, that's a 99.9% failure rate.

The only similar failure rate we could find is in the pharmaceutical, the drug development sector, where they similarly have a 99.9% failure rate. So very high failure rates. The tools the industry has had to do its work have really been built for surface discovery, but over the last decade, most of the near surface deposits have already been discovered. And so it's forcing the industry to go deeper underground, but they really haven't had the tools or don't have the tools to be able to do that efficiently and effectively, and really that's where our technology comes in. With one drill hole, we can interrogate hundreds of millions of cubic meters of earth to be able to allow the customer to more precisely target the next step of their exploration and development program.

Mike Toffel:
So, in using your technology, if you drill a hole and put your sensors down there, and you can then assess so many cubic yards or meters of soil and to look for these metals, how do you compare if it's one in a thousand using the traditional approaches? What's the commensurate number for your technology?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, I don't have a good number for you because ultimately Mike, it depends whether there was actually any minerals in the earth that we are searching. What we provide the customer with is 95% certainty that when we image a density anomaly, it's really there, or when we confirm there are no density anomalies in that 3D space, that the customer can move on without making further investments in an area that has nothing to yield. And so what we are really providing the customer with is certainty. And with that certainty, they can optimize their subsequent investments either very targeted to areas of interest or to cut and run as it will, as it were, to move on from a prospective area that doesn't yield anything to something that may. So that's really the business we're in, providing that certainty.

Mike Toffel:
Got it. And let's talk about now the environment side, so the traditional approach versus your approach, and what are the consequences of that from an environmental perspective?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah. Well, if you can imagine the traditional approach, I mean, it's really a pin cushion drug drilling activity. Hit-and-miss drilling. That drilling activity and its GHGs has impacts to the water table that maybe penetrated as a result of that drilling. with our technology, we enable minimally invasive mining techniques that the customer is not able to benefit from today because they don't have the certainty of the subset. In fact, working with one of our clients in the uranium space, and their uranium in Canada is formed in high density small pots that are very, very difficult to hit with drilling, and so with our technique, we are able to provide a 3D image in exactly the location sizing and delineation of those pots.

And the client, Orano Canada, has developed a minimally invasive extraction technique that instead of an open pit mine, they are actually drilling down, extracting the mineral from the surface and returning it to the surface, without removing all the earth that's typically involved in a traditional mining technique. And really, if we take the medical imaging analogy a step further from the 2D x-ray, the 3D CAT scan, and really medical imaging was the enabler to keyhole surgery in the human body. And that completely transformed the patient experience. And with our technology, hopefully with that analogy, you can see how it can completely help the customer transform the mining method they select to be able to dramatically change the GHG impact and a broader environmental impact in that area. And of course, from a societal perspective, nobody wants a mine in their backyard. These new techniques make mining potentially a much better neighbor with much less impact on the surface of the earth and to the communities that surround it.

Kim Lawrence:
And just add to that as well, I mean one of the things our technology enables is more efficient use of existing mining locations. So decades ago there wasn't the technology for companies to really understand if they achieved and extracted everything from a particular site before they chose to move on. And so many of those companies are now going back and taking a look at those assets to see what additional resources can be found. And so, one of the challenges with that, of course, is safety and understanding what's going on beneath the surface before you send in a crew, equipment. And so muon tomography can be used to detect subsurface voids, sinkhole, subsidence areas, areas that could be dangerous for reopening some of those resources. And so I guess I'd like to look at that as, "Why create a new mine if you can get more from an old one?" Right? So it's an environmentally responsible approach to seeking critical minerals in the short term.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, it's a bit like Brownfield development in a way in cities.

Kim Lawrence:
It totally is, yep.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. So the idea of Brownfield development and this precision medicine approach, this keyhole surgery as you described, the orthoscopic surgery for example, are the two analogies that were coming to my mind. Let's talk a little bit about what the actual targets of these efforts. So you mentioned metals as your target, how did you decide on which metals to work on? And yeah, so how did you decide on which mining targets to pursue? I imagine there's some limitations to the technology, but even then you probably need to focus, especially as a startup.

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, absolutely. First order of business was selecting our high level vertical market folks. And quite quickly, Mike, because of the energy transition, because of the need for new minerals, it had become very apparent to us that mining was a sector that the world needed us to focus on. And once you then look at mining, you're absolutely right, yeah, there are limitations in any technology, and really what role muon tomography does is image density contrasts.

And so once you recognize that we can image density contrast, you then start to look, "Well, which minerals and then mineralizations have a density contrast with the surrounding earth?" And so that quickly took us to base metals, battery metals, and uranium. The three kinds of high level buckets of minerals that have a significant density signature compared to the rest. And now the fortuitous part is that battery metals were part of the natural capability that our technology has. And of course with the market timing over the last few years and the green energy transition, and that was where we were quite fortunate. Technological capabilities lined up very nicely with the market opportunity and what the world needed in terms of additional metals.

Mike Toffel:
Now, is there an opportunity for you or others to use this technology to improve the efficiency of identifying fossil fuel reserves as well? And how are you thinking about that?

Gary Agnew:
Certainly in fossil fuels, and if I point to oil exploration, that tends to happen quite deep in the earth in the two to three to four kilometer depth range. One of the limitations of our technology is that we can image successfully down to around a kilometer deep, and so immediately that kind of took us out of the oil exploration business, but quite a number of use cases in the oil extraction business for our technology. Now, having said all of that, we're a very purpose-driven team and a purpose-driven company.

And really Kim and I, even part of the reason we left our comfortable corporate roles, is because we wanted to have a more positive impact on the world. And so we have focused our company and our work on really unlocking the ESG potential with our clients, and there is no bigger place at this moment in time for us than the mining business. To help that huge industry pivot to the critical industry, a clean energy to the world. And so, yeah, I would say almost a hundred percent of our attention is on the mining business. And so we do not and are not taking on projects in oil and gas.

Mike Toffel:
So Kim, we're hearing a lot about purpose-driven organizations, mission-driven organizations, across in the news, in our halls here at HBS, a bunch of books being written about this. And you're in an organization that, as Gary's mentioning, is sort of double clicking on that, I wonder if you can talk about how that affects the recruiting and retention and motivation of your workforce that you're bringing to bear?

Kim Lawrence:
It is a dramatic differentiator for us to have such an intriguing technology and a meaningful global purpose to how we apply it. I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of candidates, from on the science side of the house, on the corporate side of the house, every single person has said they're looking for something meaningful to do with their careers. Every single person. I haven't spoken to anyone who's like, "Yeah, I just want to make widgets."

And so for us, we leverage that a great deal, and we live it every day and it impacts every strategic decision we make at the company. And so, you talked about it, there were a lot of shiny objects when we first started talking about this, and there still are a lot of shiny objects, but they can't just be shiny, they have to be shiny and have a purpose, right? So that's where we landed, and it's drawing people from all over the world. and I'm pretty excited about that. We have an incredibly diverse team. I think with 33 people, we've got about 19 languages spoken on our compliment so far, and everybody's driven the same way.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, interesting. How many staff do you have so far?

Kim Lawrence:
Well, actually as of today, closer to 37. So we've doubled in the last six months.

Mike Toffel:
And it's quite an interdisciplinary team.

Kim Lawrence:
It is, it is. So on the technical side of the house, we've got subatomic physicists nestled next to mechanical engineers and electrical engineers. We've got assembly techs who are building detectors next to very talented inventory and warehouse people. We've got finance folks, marketing and human resources people, and of course leadership across all of them. And we're just growing another layer of our leadership with particular expertise and hardware and software engineering geosciences, and some are more mechanical components of how we do deployments worldwide. just through all of that, building relationships with our customer base around the world, that skillset, having somebody who's technically competent, who's also able to close a deal, that's been the unicorn role that we've been trying to find for a long time, and we just landed one, so I'm very excited.

Mike Toffel:
Wow. Congratulations. Wow.

Gary Agnew:
And for me, the ability to bring together those different technical disciplines and integrate them, because then ultimately the customer doesn't care, and in terms of the specifics of each of those disciplines, we provide an integrated solution to the customer. And so to Kim's point, the way we create the culture and the collaboration internally, really the better we are at that, the more seamless our solution is to the customer on the outside. And so really we work quite hard at getting the best talent, but then working together with their colleagues across an array of technical and non-tech disciplines, and to be able to deliver a full stack solution, as we call it.

Mike Toffel:
Right.

Kim Lawrence:
And for the more introverted of the bunch, we have a seven-foot tall whiteboard wrapped on all of our walls in our production areas. So you don't have to necessarily speak to somebody to communicate. So we try to facilitate interdisciplinary communication creatively.

Mike Toffel:
Fascinating. Do you have to do any cross-training like disciplinary language training?

Kim Lawrence:
Oh, a hundred percent.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah.

Kim Lawrence:
It's growing into what I like to call the Ideon Academy, but certainly we don't expect anybody who walks in our front door to know anything about the technology that we're using. So yeah, I mean, we're teaching people muon tomography 101, quite intentionally.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, very interesting. So let's talk about the operations perspective on this whole question. So how the technology is deployed like what's your sales cycle, and then what does it look like from either you or your customers to deploy your technologies? So how do you think about narrowing down the scope of all mining into the mining of these metals in this case? So now you have a target list of a bunch of companies, how do you then identify prospects? What's your pitch, and then what does it look like on the ground?

Kim Lawrence:
I would say targeted is the watchword of the day. So we've done an analysis of the globe essentially, to look at key mineral districts that align nicely with our technology and capabilities. And we target our customers very specifically from then on in. So we want to make sure that the first projects that we're doing are excellent projects that yield great case studies with amazing testimonials.

We're not looking at edge cases, we're not looking at poorly capitalized companies that may not be able to complete a project. So it's about, "Where are the great deposits? Which companies are active in those spaces, at which part in their own development cycle? Are they open to innovation? Do they have the infrastructure inside their companies to facilitate innovation throughout the mining operation?" And then, "How do we get in there and make the connections?" And that's kind of the anchor to how we've built our whole sales cycle.

It's not a short sales cycle with some of the largest mining companies in the world, it takes time, it takes a lot of education. So we're going in with a solution that sounds, as we like to call it, "A little bit woo woo." And so getting people to really understand the science and how it's different from other geophysics techniques that they've used in the past, that's a big part of our commitment to our customers. We also don't ask them to commit to any kind of a project until we've done a complete forward model using our advanced physics engine, on their specific site, with their specific challenges, so that they can feel really confident that they're committing to something legitimate, meaningful and it'll have the right outcomes for them.

And then to be honest, we white glove them through the process at this point. So the whole experience is beginning to end. Oftentimes, we're introducing people in those companies to one another, so we're bringing together different parts of major mining companies that wouldn't necessarily work together. And so that's been a pleasant surprise, I think, and a learning opportunity for us too. There's a lot of really good-hearted people doing cool things against the odds in this industry.

Mike Toffel:
Interesting.

Mike Toffel:
So supposedly you have a customer ready to go, what's the next step? What does it look like on the ground?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, so as Kim mentioned, we do that forward modeling, we give the customer a very tangible sense of what our technology will deliver before we ever land on their site. But we do land on their site, we'll ship our solution, typically air freight, we'll send a deployment team who will physically deploy the sensors down drill holes in the customer's side. They have prepared those drill holes so that they're ready to receive our sensors. That can typically take anything from a couple of days to a week, depending on the size of the deployment that we're affecting. What's nice about the way we have developed the technology, it's a full IoT framework and therefore once we're deployed, either through satellite or cell communications, we're getting data pulled in near real time, and so we're able to look here at our nerve center in Richmond, BC. We can see every deployment, every detector, understand how they're performing, how data collection is happening.

And we provide them monthly energy updates. Now with typical geophysical techniques, you run a survey, there's a lot of analysis that happens, and then some months after data collection is completed, the customer will get a result. The difference with our technique is we're able to provide the customers monthly imaging updates and so we can show them how progressively that deployment is working. And what we've found a few times is that sometimes the imaging anomalies appear much sooner than are anticipated, and that affords the customer the ability to make a decision, "Do we want a spotlight search in that particular area and really get a very strong focus there? Or if we're seeing nothing after a number of months, do we want to redeploy the equipment into another prospective area?"

So yeah, we're bringing together hardware, software, field deployment, communications, power, et cetera, and obviously a full suite of analysis to be able to turn that raw signal data into 2D and 3D models of the subsurface for the customer. So an end to end solution. We try to make Ideon easy to do business with and easy for the customer to be able to draw on the services that we offer.

Mike Toffel:
And how many sensors are you deploying, and how far apart are they?

Gary Agnew:
Very much depends on what the customer's trying to achieve, and that's a key part of the process that Kim was describing, really understanding on their site, what have they found before? Because typically, if you have found mineralization on a site of a particular size and shape, tends to be contrast, the chances are there's going to be more mineralization of that profile on the same site. So we really dial our solution in to meet the requirements or the expectations the customer has on their specific site. So what that means, Mike, is sometimes it can be five or six detectors from one drill hole, can be the extent of the survey. Other times we have been mapping two and a half kilometers or one and a half miles, of strike length, and therefore it may be five drill holes with 15 detectors across all of those drill holes. So very much depends on the area of interest and the specific mineralization the customer's looking to discover.

Kim Lawrence:
As well as the speed at which they'd like to move. And so, in many cases, we have customers who want results, they want them quickly, so they can make decisions and move on. We do have the ability to halve the imaging time by doubling the number of detectors deployed. And so, it's basically about imaging area, and so if we increase the imaging area by deploying additional defectors, we can move them along more quickly and that's proven to be quite successful.

Mike Toffel:
So Gary, let's talk about that customer side. How do the major mining companies make decisions about which areas to mine and what to go after?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah. Mike, unfortunately, the difficult reality today is that major mining companies are making billion dollar decisions with less than 1% of 1% of all the bloody knowledge. And so the error bars that mining companies are having to operate with are extraordinary, and that creates a lot of inefficiency in that industry, both economic inefficiency, but environmental efficiency. And really the role we are playing is providing the industry 95% certainty that when we say, "A density anomaly exists in a 3D space", it's really there. And with that certainty, there are tremendous optimization opportunities the mining companies have to do things differently from that point forward.

Mike Toffel:
Now, we're running this episode in a series of episodes about AI and climate, so let's talk a little bit about the AI or the artificial intelligence or machine learning aspects of your business. So can you tell us a bit about that?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, we actually use AI and ML in a number of aspects of the business, and then just the conversation we're having about deployment and designing the optimal configuration of drill holes and detectors, time, density, contrast. I mean, that's an area we use AI to optimize the survey configuration, the detector array, that will deliver the outcome the customer needs in the time frame they need it. So that's like an unsupervised learning approach we are using there.

Once we've got data from a deployment, the customer's looking to get an understanding of the geological body that we've identified in the earth, and so we use something called a structured mesh inversion, and really that's relating the raw signal data we get from our detectors and relating that to the geology in the earth. And we use that and typically, you see very blocky representations of what that geology could look like, but in truth or in nature, they aren't blocky, they are flowing, kind of twisting and turning bodies. And so we use AI in our structured meshing inversions to literally test millions of scenarios to pick the optimal structure that matches the daily underlying data that we've sensed with our detectors. So that's a secondary place where we're using AI. We bring our data often to the customer together with some of their existing data. And we also use AI and ML as a sort of prospectivity map.

I'm sure as you know, humans aren't always the best at pattern recognition, especially with the volume of data to interrogate is high, and so pattern recognition is another key technique in really helping the customer understand, "Of all the data we have, here is where we believe the highest prospective area is on your site." And really then again, about optimizing the next step in their deployment of their exploration process by doing so.

So, those are a few key examples, there are more, but AI's an important compliment to our core technology, and we're not a pure AI company. And really the way we like to express it with our customers, we bring net new data, high resolution, high certainty data, to the table. And because of the high resolution, high certainty nature of our muon tomography data, it actually enables us to make sense of lots of other lower resolution, lower certainty data that the customer may have in their existing data sets.

Kim Lawrence:
We were speaking to a customer recently who talked about the value to them of using AI for what they called unsupervised classification. So the idea of, "If we find one thing and we know what it is, and then we can do a survey that allows us to identify a hundred more of things that are somewhat classified the same way without manual intervention, we're able to get to a very good answer quickly about what it is we're looking at." So, "Even if they're blobs", they said. Blobs are fine.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, It's a form of pattern recognition.

Kim Lawrence:
Totally is.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, very interesting. So what's next for Ideon? Where do you imagine yourselves going in geographically or industry wise or scale? How are you thinking about what's next?

Gary Agnew:
Yeah, I think scale is the watchword for this phase of our journey, Mike. We have been hustling as a five person team, as a 10 person team, a 20 person, we're quickly going to be a 50 person team, and a hundred person team after that. And so scaling the business is priority number one right now. And we are fortunate to be working with some of the leading mining companies in the world. And really the opportunity with those companies, is once they get their hands on our technology, understand how it works and what it can do for them, what we find is they quickly have a suite of other projects or sites that they were engaged in.

And so the phase we're in is scaling manufacturing, scaling our software team, scaling geophysics, scaling deployment, scaling business development. Every facet of the business is growing at the moment. And really what we want to be is responsive to the customer's needs and demands from us, because working with the largest mining companies, that means we're working on the largest mines in the world, which means we have the opportunity to help the industry turn the dial on supply volume at a lower ESG impact. And therefore, that's where we're orientated is,

Mike Toffel:
And Kim, you are responsible for both bringing people in to scale with your labor force, and as well as bringing more customers in to scale the customer pool. What's next on your horizon in these two domains?

Kim Lawrence:
I love listening to Gary's ambitions there. Inspirational, I think one of the challenges we're going to face as we do scale is preserving that core culture and you meet a lot about that, about how companies have great ambitions and they're founded and everything good and things start to crack at a particular time.

So being extra conscious of that and making sure that we're nurturing this culture that is the attractor in the first place, not only for our employees but our customers too in many cases. That'll be a real focus for us. I am definitely looking forward to the opportunity to diversify responsibility on the business development side of things. I think there's a lot of opportunity out there and only enough time in the day to kind of scratch the surface.

Mike Toffel:
Neat. So let's go to the final question that I love asking which is, for those of our listeners who are thinking about going into business and climate change in some manner or another, what advice do you have for them? Resources, where should they be looking? Sort of whatever advice you might have. So Kim, can we start with you?

Kim Lawrence:
Sure. Maybe I'll just start with my portfolio, as a non-scientist, includes everything from talent marketing, communications, investor relations, government funding, BD, I would say generalize. There's huge value in being able to work across different portfolios and see the connectivity points between them, and that connectivity across all those functions is often what makes a company distinct, right? You can have all kinds of siloed operations and think that you're doing a great job that the end result is very flat, so don't specialize so much in what it is that you're doing.

And so to that end resource-wise, read everything. Read The Economist, get on some of the newsletters that the VCs distribute from a tech perspective. The inside information, some of those newsletters, I find fascinating and extremely timely, especially given the events in the last couple of weeks with banking. So yeah, digest all the information coming at you, be selective with it obviously, but I wouldn't eliminate anything. It's interesting to see the trends.

Mike Toffel:
Great.

Kim Lawrence:
Yeah.

Mike Toffel:
Are there specific examples of those VC newsletters that you wanted to share?

Kim Lawrence:
There are. I actually get StrictlyVC that I look at on a regular basis, and more sort of locally in our area. Some of the tech journals in British Columbia and the Vancouver area are quite useful, like Vancouver Tech Journal and Techcouver, those touch something. Yeah.

Mike Toffel:
Great, great. Thanks, and we'll put links in the show notes.

Gary Agnew:
Maybe more advice than resource. My advice to people considering a career in climate or climate tech. My advice is be courageous. Yeah, the world needs major industrial powerhouses, likes of BHP, Glencore, Vale, the types of customers we are working with. We need those companies to be courageous, and for them to be courageous, they need talent that's courageous. And if I take Kim, in my personal experience, it took some courage to leave the comfort of our corporate roles, but the reward for being prepared to take a risk, to be courageous, to put yourself out there is remarkable.

And so the imposter syndrome, I think is something that is more widespread than most of us would care to accept, and I would say that imposter is holding you back from your true potential. And so, the fear is always greater than the reality. And so push through the fear, be courageous, and go after the career that you want. And a career today in STEM can be something quite different than a career in STEM even 10 years ago. So I think the world is full of amazing opportunities, but it will be the brave and courageous who grab them, who end up redefining major industries in our world and the contribution they make to it.

Mike Toffel:
Thank you so much for spending time with us on Climate Rising and for sharing your story of Ideon technologies and where you've come from and where you're heading. Really appreciate it.

Gary Agnew:
Thanks very much, Mike.

Kim Lawrence:
Thanks, Mike.

Mike Toffel:
That was my conversation with Gary Agnew, CEO and Co-founder of Ideon Technologies, and Kim Lawrence, VP of Talent and Customer Experience.