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Meet the winners of The Mining Evolution

Posted on September 13, 2019

After an intense day at Planta Magnetita, more than 50 people attended the Pitch Day, where the 6 finalists of The Mining Evolution presented their solutions in front of a top level jury.

The winners will apply pilots to solve two major challenges posed during the call: achieving predictive maintenance of the entire plant and improving grinding productivity.

The Mining Evolution call, made by Grupo CAP, through its Innovation Space, and CAP Minería together with ChileGlobal Ventures, the venture capital area of Fundación Chile, bore fruit: after a three-month campaign, 70 applications received and 6 finalists, the winners were defined to apply their innovative solutions in one of the most iconic mining recycling operations in Chile, Planta Magnetita.

The final stage of the call was held in Tierra Amarilla, where 6 high-level startups made their pitches to public authorities and managers, executives and workers of Grupo CAP.

The winners were the startups Altum Lab and Tesseracto, both national innovations, which will improve the productivity of Planta Magnetita through technology, predictive models and artificial intelligence.

The activity was attended by a select jury who defined the winners, composed by Adolph Möller, Superintendent of Magnetite Plant CAP Minería; Agustín Longton, Project Manager of the Innovation Space CAP; Rodrigo Martínez, Assistant Manager of Technology and Innovation CAP Minería; Patricio Contador, Head of Innovation and Change Management CAP Minería; Silvia Zuleta, Regional Director of CORFO; Maurizio Moschini, Business Development Leader of ChileGlobal Ventures and Jamie Riggs, Managing Director of ChileGlobal Ventures.

After the jury’s deliberation, Magnetita’s Superintendent Adolph Möller said “the process was comfortable, dynamic and full of initiative. We have just chosen the winning companies and now comes the most interesting thing, for them to implement their projects. We hope that these ideas will allow us to be increasingly productive, safe and efficient”.

Pamela Urrea, Executive Director of the CAP Innovation Space, expressed her enthusiasm for being part of this open innovation initiative, and explained “we are happy to promote these enriching instances for the entrepreneurial ecosystem and for innovation in the companies of the CAP Group. As an Innovation Space we are sure that this initiative is one of many that will allow us to contribute value to the Group”.

ChileGlobal Ventures’ Managing Director, Jamie Riggs, stated “it has been very rewarding to work with CAP. They were very willing to open their plant to entrepreneurs and that generated a very valuable experience for them. In this call we have reaffirmed the importance that companies acquire to promote innovation in different industries. CAP bet on national and regional talent to move the frontier of what is possible and this event has been a reflection of that. We want to continue supporting companies like CAP to promote the best entrepreneurs and introduce innovation in large corporations”.

Winning startups

From now on, Altum Lab and Tesseracto will have the challenge of digitally transforming Planta Magnetita for optimal operation.

Altum Lab will be in charge of improving the productivity of the mill; through its Boss platform, based on mathematical heuristics and artificial intelligence, mixing the available plant stock in order to achieve the best possible operating quality at the lowest operating cost.

Meanwhile, Tesseracto will be in charge of installing a system that allows a complete predictive maintenance in all the plant, work that they will make by means of a software developed by themselves, which generates predictive models on the state of key equipment based on semantic information extracted from descriptions made by workers in the field.

Although only Altum Lab and Tesseracto will close a contract with Grupo CAP, the rest of the startups also won prizes in order to continue with the development of their innovations: Kapptek and Octo Inc. received $4.000, while JP Innovation and Rio Analytics received $2.000, obtaining second and third places respectively.

Altum Lab’s CEO and co-founder, Madeleine Valderrama, highlighted the support received at Planta Magnetita during the week of testing. “It was all very dynamic and collaborative. Generally, companies with a great track record are closed in terms of innovation and here it turned out to be the opposite. You can see that they are taking the next step, to start leading not only in terms of production quality, but also in technology and innovation, and this is appreciated”.

Similar words were expressed by the Operations Manager of Tesseracto, Jaime Rovegno. “The process was very well structured by ChileGlobal Ventures and CAP Minería; we invite all startups that want to join a similar process, because they will find a great support team to make their achievements a reality”.

About CAP Group

CAP is the main producer of iron ore and pellets on the American Pacific coast, the largest steel producer in Chile and the most important steel processor in the country.

Today, CAP Group has various operations distributed throughout Chile, becoming the only company present in the entire iron and steel value chain, from iron mining (CAP Minería), to steel production (CAP Acero) and in the elaboration of steel solutions (Grupo de Procesamiento de Acero), in an effort to satisfy the needs of its many national and foreign clients.

In addition to the above, it owns CAP Infraestructura, a business that includes the desalinated water producer Cleanairtech Sudamérica S.A., the electricity transmission company Tecnocap S.A. and Puerto Las Losas S.A.

About ChileGlobal Ventures

ChileGlobal Ventures is the Venture Capital area of Fundación Chile, whose mission is to interconnect its main actors to generate better and greater investment opportunities in startups with a high innovative content and strategic value for the economic and human development of Chile and Latin America.

ChileGlobal Ventures has a portfolio of more than 180 financed startups; having $30.5 million capital under management among its four lines of business: its accelerator, its angel investor network, its CLIN investment fund and its open innovation projects.