Terra AI Raises $20M in Series A Funding Led by Khosla Ventures

The company plans to use the funding to speed up the rollout of its generative geological modeling platform across mining, enhanced geothermal energy, and carbon storage projects.

Terra AI uses patented technology that combines multiple types of exploration data to generate millions of possible geological models. This helps teams evaluate a wide range of subsurface scenarios and choose the best drilling and geophysical strategies.

By reducing uncertainty and assessing project economics earlier, Terra AI supports better decision-making across the full resource development process—from selecting assets to developing them. Its risk-based insights help explorers move projects forward faster and more efficiently to meet global resource demand.

Typically, new resource discoveries take about 17 years to reach production. Terra AI helps shorten this timeline by using all available exploration data to quickly generate accurate 3D geological models that show assets and uncertainty in minutes.

The platform also includes a geology reasoning agent that helps operators design more precise exploration plans, reducing time, cost and environmental impact. It is also being used for carbon storage projects, where understanding subsurface uncertainty is essential for choosing safe and long-term storage sites.

Over the past year, Terra AI has shown strong results in mining, and reservoir projects, supporting customers from early exploration through production. The company is gaining early commercial traction across copper, gold, rare earth elements (REE) and reservoir developments.

Its technology targets one of the most time consuming, and capital-intensive parts of resource development. By improving geological modeling, Terra AI helps reduce the time and cost needed to define and evaluate deposits and reservoirs, enabling faster, and more accurate resource development decisions.

"The world's ability to discover and develop critical resources is fundamentally constrained by outdated, fragmented exploration," said Rajesh Swaminathan, Partner at Khosla Ventures. "Terra AI is defining a new, AI native exploration approach with their continuously improving 3D Earth model. We believe their technology will dramatically accelerate the development of the critical minerals the world needs and we are excited to help them scale this vision globally."

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"Explorers today face increasing complexities like rising project uncertainty and immense pressure to bring new resources online faster," said John Mern, CEO of Terra AI. "This investment enables us to move to the next phase of Terra AI's growth by scaling our generative modeling engine, accelerating enterprise-grade deployments, and advancing the subsurface inference technology the industry needs to meet critical mineral demand."

About Terra AI

Founded in 2023 by John Mern, Anthony Corso, and Markus Zechner, Terra AI uses advanced AI to solve complex subsurface exploration challenges. Its patented platform combines geophysics, geochemistry and drilling data to create probabilistic underground models, helping make resource exploration faster, more accurate and more cost efficient.

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