Mining & Critical Minerals · Africa
Ophir Earth
Geospatial AI · Long-term Venture
Ophir's flagship long-term venture: a geospatial-AI operating system for African mining. Ophir Earth fuses satellite imagery, geophysics, drone telemetry and field data into a living model of the subsurface — putting targeting, operations and compliance intelligence into the hands of the small and medium-scale miners who feed the world's critical-minerals economy.
The Challenge
Africa's small and medium-scale miners feed roughly a third of the world's critical-minerals economy — copper, cobalt, gold, lithium, manganese, emeralds — with almost none of its mining intelligence. An artisanal cobalt cooperative digs by intuition; a copper junior waits weeks for an assay; a regulator chases violations on paper. The earth speaks and the data exists, but the intelligence never arrives in time.
Ophir's Role
Ophir is designing and building Ophir Earth — a geospatial-AI platform that fuses satellite, geophysical, drone and field data into one living, queryable model of the African subsurface, on an offline-first, multilingual stack built for the pit, not the boardroom. It spans seven layers on one data model and AI substrate: Atlas (geospatial map), Oracle (multilingual AI copilot), Compass (operations), Sentinel (environmental & compliance monitoring), Vault (provenance-grade production registry), Field (offline mobile / WhatsApp), and Capital (financing & investor intelligence).
What We Delivered
- Atlas — a unified geospatial model (satellite, geology, tenure, infrastructure, hazards)
- Oracle — a multilingual, grounded AI copilot for targeting & operations
- Compass — mine planning, production, equipment & safety tracking
- Sentinel — satellite environmental change detection & automated regulator reporting
- Vault — tamper-evident, provenance-grade production records
- Field — offline-first mobile + WhatsApp for the pit and the road
- Capital — operational data turned into financeable, auditable cash-flow visibility
Outcome
Ophir Earth is pre-product and in active R&D — architecture, geology-specific models and AI workflows are being built in the open. It is Ophir's flagship long-term venture: the operating layer between raw earth data and the decisions that shape extraction, ESG and capital across African mining.
Ophir Earth is a long-term venture in pre-product R&D. The seven layers describe designed scope at varying stages of exploration, not shipped features; nothing here is a claim of a deployed product.