The Problem Nobody Has Solved

Mineral exploration has changed remarkably little in the era of digital transformation. Where industries from logistics to financial services have been reshaped by real-time data, mining exploration has remained dependent on geochemical sampling — bottlenecked by manual labour and slow assay-lab turnaround times that together offer only a slow and sparse view of the deposit. The cost of that uncertainty in failed drills, wasted capital and missed deposits runs into billions across the industry each year.

Voluna's platform attacks that bottleneck directly. Rather than being subject to the status quo, its NAA system reads the geochemical signature of the subsurface in the field — delivering the kind of direct elemental data that exploration teams have never previously been able to access without ground disturbance and a boots-on-the-ground footprint.

The idea was straightforward. Getting there, less so.

Where Things Get Real

An airborne platform had always been the goal. But before it could fly, the underlying physics had to be proven on the ground. In October 2025, Voluna deployed its alpha ground prototype, codenamed Gammine, for the first time in a live exploration environment — a proof of concept for the core neutron activation analysis technology.

“We came away accomplished but humbled,” Al says. “Deployment is where things get real. Equipment breaks, and terrain and conditions are always underestimated.”

The ground test did its job: it confirmed the core technology worked. But it was never the destination. A ground-based system, however capable, would always be constrained by the rugged, remote terrain that defines where mineral exploration actually happens. To move the needle at scale, the technology had to leave the ground — and getting a neutron activation analysis system onto an airborne platform was where the real engineering challenges lay.

“If our technology was going to move the needle in mineral exploration, we had to deploy and test our airborne system as much as possible — and let the field surface every problem we couldn’t have predicted.”

The Six-Month Sprint

What followed was a six-month design cycle — rapid, iterative and built on the aerospace engineering backgrounds that Al and the Voluna team brought from previous careers at Blue Origin, Astranis and NASA. The result was the Beta Gammine aerial prototype: a system built to pair with the latest heavy-lift drones, featuring custom carbon-fibre structures, an in-house nuclear payload and proprietary materials engineered to keep the system compact without sacrificing capability. Small but mighty, in Al's words, and designed to go where ground systems cannot.

The goal was to demonstrate something that had never been done: airborne neutron activation analysis at a live mineral exploration project. The physics had to work. The drone integration had to work. The data had to be meaningful. And it all had to happen in the field, under real conditions, with real consequences if it did not.

Winnemucca

The site chosen was the Speed Goat project in northern Nevada, with access provided by Scout Discoveries. When the Voluna team pulled into Winnemucca, the scale of what they were attempting became immediate and concrete.

“The logistics, the terrain, the access, the conditions,” Al says. “We had to get comfortable burning down multiple risks at once, pushing the envelope incrementally, with the business quite literally on the line.”

The days that followed had a discipline to them. Early mornings, crossing paths with pronghorn and cattle on the commute out to site. Long hours running drone test flights, payload tests and ground surveys. Work until sundown, then back out the next morning. The site sat at around 2,000 metres of elevation — high enough that the thinner air pushes heavy-lift drones close to their operational limits, narrowing the margin for everything else.

“We knew the opportunity in front of us, and every moment counted.”

The payload had been damaged in transit and had to be rebuilt on location — the hotel room turned into an improvised workshop, with a 3D printer the team had brought along earning its place in the luggage. The drone being used had been built for an entirely different purpose. The conditions were exactly the kind that separate a technology that works in a controlled environment from one that works where it needs to. Every test flight was a data point. Every measurement brought the team closer to, or further from, the result they had come to prove.

By the end of the trip, they had done it.

At 2,000 metres, in thin air, with a rebuilt payload on a repurposed drone, the Voluna team collected the world's first airborne NAA measurements at a live mineral exploration project — and proved they could detect copper-in-soil anomalies from the air.

“We joke that the footage alone was worth it,” Al says. “But the real result was bigger.”

It was made more significant by who was watching. Representatives from Rio Tinto and Antofagasta were on-site for the demonstration, a signal of the industry appetite for what Voluna is building and a motivation that didn‘t end when the team packed up and drove back out of the Nevada desert.

“Having representatives from Rio Tinto and Antofagasta share in the excitement gave us even more motivation to go back out and build it better.”

The Next Chapter In Perth

Voluna arrived in Perth just a couple of weeks after Nevada, with a proof point to build on. The world's first airborne NAA measurement at a live exploration project was behind them, what lay ahead was the commercial and operational infrastructure to scale it; and Perth, as the operational and commercial centre of the global mining industry, was the right place to begin.

As part of Rio Tinto Mining Cohort 4, Voluna gained access to the expertise, facilities, partner network and real-world operational environments that a company at this precise stage needed most. The relationship with Rio Tinto that had begun on-site in Nevada continued in Perth, in a different landscape but with the same momentum and a clearer picture of what building it better would take.

The Nevada desert proved the technology works. Perth was where the industry began to understand what that means.

“Airborne geochemistry is a capability only previously dreamed about,” Al says. “We believe we’ve taken the first step toward making that dream a reality.”

Voluna is part of the fourth Mining Tech cohort delivered by Founders Factory in partnership with the Rio Tinto.