Giraffe Bio, an Argentine startup with operations in Chile, closed a US$6.4 million seed round to scale its biochemical reagent technology applied to copper mining.
The round was led by Orion Industrial Ventures, a venture capital fund specialized in technologies for mining, mineral processing and industrial decarbonization, with the participation of BHP Ventures, the investment arm of the mining company BHP, Twynam, the Argentine fund AIR Capital and Baruch Future Ventures. The company already had the support of SOSV, which incorporated it into its IndieBio accelerator in New York.
The company works on flotation, the process that separates valuable minerals from waste material and on which about 80% of global copper production depends. Using AI-assisted molecular design and cell-free biology, it creates biomolecules that selectively attach to copper.
Each reagent is tailored to the specific mineralogy of each operation and incorporated into existing chemical circuits, without new equipment or living organisms in the mine. According to the company, in laboratory validations with real samples its reagents increased copper recovery between 3 and 5 percentage points, an advance that in the industry translates directly into tons of metal and millions of dollars.
The Founders: From Yale Biochemistry to Columbia Business School
Giraffe Bio was founded in 2024 by Alejandro Buffo Sempé, CEO who graduated from Columbia Business School, and Juan Pablo Fernández, scientific director (CSO), geneticist and doctor in Biochemistry with a postdoctorate at Yale. Juan Pablo Fernández led the genomic editing area of the Rosario biotechnology company BioHeuris between 2018 and 2023.
The duo’s proposal is to transfer the manual of drug discovery to the mining sector: explore molecular combinations that would be impossible to test manually and adapt each reagent to the conditions of each deposit.
“Mining companies need to process increasingly complex minerals, but the chemistry used to separate them has changed little in decades,” explained Alejandro Buffo.
The company was also the first Latin American startup selected by the Breakthrough Energy fellows program, which provides financing, technical assistance and access to an international network of specialists to accelerate the commercialization of clean technologies.
From the laboratory to industrial pilots, with copper as the first market
In the last year, Giraffe Bio went from laboratory development to validating its technology with international miners in different types of copper ore. With the new capital, the company will scale production, advance towards larger scale trials in industrial conditions, add research capacity and expand its technical and commercial teams.
The context works in its favor. S&P Global projects that global copper demand will reach 42 million tons in 2040, with a supply shortfall of 10 million tons.
The metal is a critical input for electric vehicles, renewable energy, electrical grids and data center infrastructure. In this scenario, any technology capable of extracting more metal than what miners already process faces a market with structural demand.
Although its initial development is focused on copper, Giraffe Bio’s platform is designed for the recovery of critical minerals in general.
