[Hiring] Co-Founder & CTO, New Venture: AI-Native Critical Mineral Discovery Company @Diagram

Role Description

The energy transition runs on metals. The IEA projects critical mineral demand to more than double by 2040. Copper faces a 25% supply shortfall by 2035, and lithium is worse at up to 40%. Nickel, cobalt, and rare earths are all in deficit. New processing and recycling tech close maybe 10% to 30% of that gap. The rest has to come from new mines.

The bottleneck starts at discovery:

• High failure rates: Only one in 1,000 early-stage exploration projects ever becomes an economic mine.
• Escalating costs: The average discovery now costs C$240M, up 60% in two decades. The easy deposits are gone; what remains is deeper and harder to detect.
• Fragmented data: Decades of exploration data sit trapped in government archives, company filings, and handwritten drill logs. Geologists spend 50% to 80% of their time manipulating data.
• Expensive guesswork: Targeting decisions remain largely empirical and blind. A single misdirected drill campaign burns C$500K to C$2M.

We are building Canada's first AI-native critical mineral discovery company. We turn multi-modal geoscience data into ranked targets, acquire the best properties, and run field validation to reduce uncertainty before a drill goes in the ground. We compress what traditionally takes exploration teams years into months at a fraction of the cost, optimizing for major discoveries that redefine mining districts and supply critical minerals for decades.

Previous AI exploration tools failed because they overfit on known deposits and output prospectivity maps with no traceable geological rationale or uncertainty scores. Nobody has combined the right expertise, data pipeline, and model architecture to actually make it work. The timing is now, and Canada is the right place to start. Modern AI models can finally process scanned PDFs and handwritten logs at scale. Canada offers the deepest public geoscience data infrastructure globally, and the federal government actively subsidizes critical mineral exploration.

With extensive market validation completed and active commercial conversations already underway with mining companies of all sizes, we are looking for a Co-Founder & CTO to build the data pipeline and ML technology for this business from scratch. As Co-Founder & CTO, you'll define and execute the technology vision, build and inspire a high-caliber technical team, and guide product direction.

Please note: This is not an employment opportunity at Diagram, but an opportunity in a new company created through our venture studio model.

Qualifications

• You are a seasoned technologist ready for a new challenge.
• You have a track record of building scalable ML and data products end-to-end, in fast-growth environments.
• You have experience building at the intersection of machine learning, data engineering, and complex, sparse, multi-modal datasets.
• You have previously hired and led strong technical teams across engineering, architecture, and data science functions.
• You have familiarity with earth sciences data (geology, geophysics, geochemistry, remote sensing).

Benefits

• A significant equity stake in the venture.
• A pre-seed led by Diagram, with Diagram intending to lead the seed round and reserving capital for future rounds.
• A thesis validated through extensive primary research, with active commercial leads already in conversation.
• Direct access to Diagram and Sagard's network across mining, institutional capital, and tech. We handle early administrative overhead so you can focus on building.

Company Description

Diagram's mission is to create companies that solve meaningful problems. We match vetted ideas with proven entrepreneurs passionate about solving the problem, and partner as a co-founder to support them throughout the journey. Since 2016, Diagram has raised over $400M and has launched and invested in 40+ companies in the fintech and climatetech sectors. Our ecosystem includes 200+ angel investors and an extended global network of corporate partners, investors, and builders. Diagram is part of Sagard, a global multi-strategy alternative investment platform with over $46B in AUM.

Diagram and its portfolio companies are equal-opportunity employers. Only selected applicants will be contacted for interviews.