Kobold Metals is a California-based mining-exploration company backed by Bill Gates. The firm uses everything from ancient maps to artificial intelligence to discover what lies beneath the ground. Its central innovation is an economic model, pioneered by Jef Caers, a geologist at Stanford University, that draws on game theory to quantify how much is unknown about an area and where uncertainty is concentrated. Rather than drilling where it expects to find the biggest prize, Kobold drills the hole that reduces the unknowns most drastically, an approach that resembles the algorithms banks use to ascertain the credit risk of countries.
After drilling just a few dozen holes, Kobold discovered millions of tonnes of copper in Zambia's Copperbelt province—the biggest find in the region in a century. The arc of copper running through central Africa was first mapped by Victorian explorers and mined by a colonial British firm, but the search for deposits had been only occasionally fruitful since.
Josh Goldman is KoBold's boss. In August 2025 KoBold became the first American firm in a decade to hold a Congolese exploration licence. The firm is preparing to drill Manono, one of the world's biggest known lithium deposits, folded between layers of granite in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Manono could on its own produce more lithium than America imports each year. KoBold insists it can operate in Congo without paying bribes—an optimism it attributes to America's backing under the Trump administration's Washington Accords, which smoothed dealings with Congolese officials. Every KoBold employee in the region wears an American flag on their arm, "to show that we have the weight of America behind us". The firm is planning its own mine rather than handing off to a larger resource major.
Albrecht's Law: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well-being.