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Select Quotes From This Episode:
“The total addressable market for nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese this year, half a trillion dollars, $500 billion is spent on these four metals today. By 2035, it will be one trillion a year.” –Oliver
“Each one of those 40 areas has something like 250 billion dollars worth of metals on the seabed floor.” –Oliver
“We’re using a fleet of drones that are all battery powered and these drones are hovering... they use AI and computer vision to selectively pick up the rocks one by one with an array of arms and store them inside.”–Oliver
“The problem is all these metals in Africa and Indonesia and elsewhere, China controls them. It’s too late. But in the seabed... we have an opportunity.” –Oliver
“I would say I have a pretty high threshold for pain. Entrepreneurial and startup stuff is not easy. It’s difficult. It’s not as glamorous as people think.” –Oliver
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Hey everyone, Silas here. Welcome back to CleanTechies. Your reliable source for great interviews with CleanTech founders, investors, and experts.
In today’s episode, we’re going deep (literally) into one of the most untouched frontiers on Earth. My guest, Oliver Gunasekara, is the co-founder and CEO of Impossible Metals, a company on a mission to mine the ocean floor without wrecking the planet.
Now, before you picture some massive vacuum ripping up the seabed, forget it. That’s how it’s been done for fifty years. Impossible Metals flipped the script. Instead of tractors and dredges, they’ve built fleets of autonomous underwater robots. Battery-powered, self-piloting, and armed with computer vision, these things hover above the seabed, picking up polymetallic nodules one by one like a sci-fi claw machine.
These nodules are loaded with four critical metals: nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese. The same metals that power EVs, wind turbines, batteries, and AI data centers. Every piece of the clean economy runs on metals like these. But here’s the problem: land-based mining is running out of high-grade ore. It’s also slow, expensive, and environmentally brutal.
Oliver’s approach? Ten times cheaper. Zero deforestation. No child labor. And every operation runs off clean electricity.
The world needs metals, but we need a better way to get them.
The geopolitical angle makes this even crazier. China currently controls between 40 and 90 percent of the world’s mineral supply. Deep-sea mining could flip that balance, giving the West a new, independent source of critical minerals.
Impossible Metals already secured its own licensed exploration area through the Kingdom of Bahrain. And since the US never signed the UN’s Law of the Sea, it’s basically a two-track race to secure access. Oliver says the deep ocean is “the new real estate rush” and his team is staking claim on the highest-grade zones before anyone else.
And here’s the kicker: the market is massive — a half-trillion-dollar metals industry today that’s projected to hit a trillion by 2035.
Oliver’s story goes beyond the tech, though. We talk about what it takes to build world-class teams, people who are “orders of magnitude better,” as he puts it, and how to align them on mission. We talk about fundraising clarity, why first-of-a-kind technologies need patient capital, and what it means to build something the world has literally never seen before.
It’s a conversation about innovation, geopolitics, and the future of clean materials.
Make sure to hit follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening, because we’ve got a huge announcement coming this quarter. Enjoy listening!
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📝 Show Notes:
Topics
Here are some key timestamps from the episode:
2:28 Introduction and Technology of Impossible Metals
15:10 250 billion in each area and trillions of dollars between here and Hawaii
17:27 How the Law of the Sea Works
18:00 Why the U.S. Has Not Signed the UN Law of the Sea
23:02 China Controls a Large Percentage of the Metals
25:30 One Half a Trillion Dollars in Total Addressable Market Today
30:07 Economics of a Mine
32:30 Quantifying the cost advantage
35:34 Open Source the Data They Collect
38:53 How Much Metal is in the Ocean
44:44 On Land and Ocean Mining
45:09 Advice on Building and Managing a High-Performance Team Based on His experience as a four-time Founder
53:02 Find people who are aligned with the mission
54:35 Open and Transparent Culture
57:00 On Fundraising
Links
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This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.
