Ancient industries, new technology and Hades

Hades Mining has raised €20M to date with its most recent €15M seed round raised earlier this month. The company previously raised a €5.5M pre-seed in August 2025 from Project A, Visionaries Tomorrow, and the Founders Factory x Rio Tinto accelerator.

To understand why Hades matters, it is worth looking at how drilling is done today. The diamond drill bit was invented in the mid-nineteenth century and remains the core technology for subsurface exploration. It has gone through incremental improvements over the decades, harder materials, better cooling, more efficient motors. But fundamentally the technology is the same: a rotating bit that physically grinds through rock.

Drilling serves three main purposes in mining. The first is exploration, pulling up core samples to understand what’s underground and whether it’s worth going after. The second is production drilling, boring holes that are packed with explosives to blast ore out of rock. The third is in-situ leaching, where a solution is pumped down through drilled wells to dissolve target minerals underground, then pumped back up for processing.

Strip it all back and the economics of both mining and geothermal energy come down to a pretty simple question: how quickly can you drill a hole, how deep can you go, and how much will that cost?

In good conditions, drilling progresses at roughly one to five metres per hour. In hard rock, the granite/basalt formations that cover much of Europe, it is often slower and significantly more expensive. Every few hundred metres the drill bit must be pulled out and replaced, and at depth, heat and pressure increase the wear and costs.

Hades is answering that question with a high-powered laser. Instead of mechanical grinding, their system ablates rock directly. There is no physical contact, no tool wear, and no performance penalty at depth. It is quiet, which matters for EU permitting, and early tests show a 50-100x improvement in drilling speeds.

If drilling becomes an order of magnitude faster and cheaper, deposits that were previously uneconomical can be mined again. This is important for all the long-abandoned mining deposits dotted around Europe.

The same logic applies to geothermal energy where drilling costs are the limiting factor. Every kilometre deeper unlocks exponentially higher temperatures and energy density. Most projects stop at 3-4km because the cost curve becomes negative. If drilling costs drop, the viable depth and therefore the available energy expands in tandem.

Hades is tackling two of the largest industries on the planet: energy and mining. Both have historically been under-loved by VCs more broadly, and definitely avoided by those in Europe.

Their ambition is to build a vertically integrated business that controls access to the resource while improving the entire process end to end. They’re building a new technology that is faster, cheaper, and better suited to Europe’s geology and standards.

The fact that they have raised €15M just four months after closing a €5.5M pre-seed is a statement of their credibility and ambition, and is an early signal that mining in Europe is starting to move at a pace that would have been unthinkable not long ago.

Europe’s startup mining opportunity

Europe has an opportunity to take ownership of how its critical materials are accessed and processed, and to extend its innovations to the rest of the world.

The continent holds known hard-rock deposits across 33 countries, alongside vast volumes of underutilised industrial and electronic waste. What has changed is not geology, but technology. Advances in high-speed drilling, AI-driven optimisation and biological processing are transforming what is economically and environmentally viable.

Instead of replicating twentieth-century extraction models, Europe can build a new industrial layer around intelligence and precision. Faster drilling unlocks stranded deposits. Advanced modelling reduces waste before projects begin. Biological separation enables recovery from lower-grade resources and complex streams once considered uneconomic.

This shift reframes mining from volume to value, extracting more from less disturbance, reducing embodied carbon, shortening supply chains and strengthening energy security.

As electrification, AI infrastructure, robotics and advanced manufacturing accelerate, demand for copper, lithium, rare earths and battery metals will only grow. Europe’s startups have an untapped opportunity to lead in responsible, technology-enabled resource development.