Mining start-ups need more support in Europe, say experts

Claire Jenns

Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:43 AM 3 min read

Start-ups successful Europe’s mining and captious earthy materials sectors are underfunded, agreed speakers astatine the EIT RawMaterials Summit.

EU Commissioner Jessika Roswall opened the 2nd time by addressing “fragmentation” successful Europe’s earthy materials marketplace and the request for a azygous superior marketplace – a telephone that was echoed by Bernd Schäfer, CEO of EIT RawMaterials, which provides backing and enactment to start-ups crossed the continent.

“We indispensable marque definite that we travel up with nationalist financing to bring start-ups to marketplace and debar mushrooming of much of the aforesaid innovations but standardise them,” helium stated.

Roswall, EU Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy, confirmed that the EU is moving to simplify its backing and assistance processes, which contiguous a obstruction to smaller companies looking to summation a foothold successful the mining sector.

On a sheet called ‘Crossing the Valley of Death: Europe’s Raw Materials Start-up Ecosystem’, Ella Cullen, co-founder and CMO of Minespider, a Berlin-based start-up that offers a blockchain-based traceability level for the mining industry, echoed the telephone for little fragmentation successful the region.

“It is an implicit conflict for start-ups to run with each the antithetic languages and ineligible implications of each state and bureaucracy,” stated Cullen.

Minespider has received respective grants, immoderate from the EIT RawMaterials Booster Programme, and enactment crossed astir €30m ($33.54m) of EU funded projects, she added.

EIT RawMaterials entree to concern manager Anthony Slotboom agreed that a azygous superior marketplace is important for start-ups. “There has been speech of this for 10 years. For idiosyncratic consenting to instrumentality a hazard successful earthy materials, determination would beryllium a overmuch bigger excavation from which start-ups could entree superior much easily.”

Benedikt Sobotka, CEO of Alpha Future Funds and erstwhile CEO of Eurasian Resources Group, asserted that the backstage concern scenery isn’t overmuch better.

“Predominantly, mining exertion start-ups, specified arsenic [those] successful geospatial information analysis, are privately funded extracurricular of Europe,” Sobotka said, noting that the concern ecosystem is overmuch smaller than successful the US.

“Such companies turn and standard truthful overmuch faster determination [in the US] and the anticipation for a important exit is amended than successful Europe. This is due to the fact that determination are ample buyers and an IPO [initial nationalist offering] market, which successful Europe for caller exertion companies is comparatively dead,” helium said.

Beyond offering a azygous product, scalability to instrumentality vantage of the planetary quality of the mining manufacture was proffered arsenic a cardinal strategy for start-ups, with mining bundle solutions highlighted arsenic a peculiarly promising country to pull backstage investors and unafraid nationalist funding.