A startup by a former Tesla engineer is exploiting Pronto technology to help automate a copper mine

There is a lot of interest in domestic manufacturing in the United States these days. But for Turner Caldwell, who spent nearly a decade at Tesla, there’s not enough interest in the minerals and metals further down the supply chain.

That’s why he left Tesla and created Mariana Minerals in 2024. The purpose of his startup is to become a modern mining (and refining) operation primed for growth, because Caldwell basically has one goal: to bring more refined minerals into the ecosystem. To do this, his company is trying to automate almost every aspect of the mining process imaginable.

The newest piece is vehicles. Mariana Minerals on Thursday announced a partnership with Pronto, a startup developing autonomous driving systems for haul trucks and other off-road vehicles used on construction and mining sites.

It’s Pronto’s first deal since it was acquired by Atoms, the new robotics venture run by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. The acquisition reunites Kalanick with Bronto founder Anthony Levandowski, the former Google self-driving project engineer and the controversial entrepreneur behind Auto, which Uber acquired in 2016.

The partnership with Pronto will see the autonomous haul trucks start operating next week at Copper One, a formerly idle copper mine in Utah that Marianna purchased last year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Caldwell told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview that the partnership is about more than just having self-driving trucks operating on site. Pronto’s autonomous operating system will be integrated directly into the software Mariana has developed to run operations at the mine, which it calls “MineOS.” This would make it possible to dispatch trucks autonomously and coordinate their routes without a human in the loop, he said.

This is part of Caldwell’s broader vision for how the mine will be managed in the future. It involves multiple operating systems that use reinforcement learning to automate and ultimately coordinate operations across the entire mine.

“The big Western mining companies look a lot like Ford and General Motors before Tesla. They look a lot like NASA before SpaceX. They look a lot like the big primary defense companies before Anduril,” he said. “The rate of uptake of software and technology in the space is essentially determined by operating teams that don’t really have an incentive to change how they work, right? If they’re able to create their own KPIs, you know, spreadsheets, walkie-talkies, paper reports — that works well.”

In Caldwell’s view, this limits the mine’s output and leaves obvious efficiencies on the table. But he also believes it is existential.

“Because Western mining companies are not building a lot of new infrastructure, the talent pool has not been attracted to them effectively, so the workforce is decreasing,” he said. This means that mines will be stuck trying to do more with less. Caldwell sees Mariana’s software-first approach as the solution to this problem.

Obviously, this could be good for Mariana. But if this approach works, it could also benefit other mines. Caldwell said selling Marianna’s coordination program is on the table, especially after it’s been proven.

But Caldwell said he wasn’t interested in doing that from the start. “The core business should be selling minerals,” he said.

“The company is the orchestration layer. So, if you’re doing that, at that point, you’re better off doing vertical integration, and starting to fabricate the metal, rather than just selling software,” he said. “I think SpaceX is not going to be a very big seller [rocket] “NASA Landing Return Program.”

Additionally, owning and operating the mine is critical to the reinforcement learning loop, Caldwell said, not only because it allows for better control and higher-resolution data, but also because it can ultimately help make decisions that are currently difficult for humans to see. Caldwell likened this to how AlphaGo, the chess-playing program developed by DeepMind a decade ago, can make moves that humans wouldn’t have thought of after they’ve trained on enough data.

Despite all the talk about automation, Caldwell said he’s not trying to take humans out of mining operations. Like many other founders working in this sector, he believes that Marianna will truly expand the already sifted talent pool.

“Part of this is to reduce labor costs, but that’s not really the goal,” he said. “The goal is actually to enable more productivity within our constrained labor pool. Automation and autonomy will create more jobs, because we will have more working mines.”