Former Tesla engineer’s startup taps Pronto to help automate a copper mine

There is a lot of attention to domestic manufacturing in the United States these days. But for Turner Caldwell, who spent nearly a decade at Tesla, not enough attention is paid to the minerals and metals at the bottom of the supply chain.

That’s why he left Tesla and started Mariana Minerals in 2024. His startup aims to be a modern mining (and refining) business set up for growth, because Caldwell essentially has one goal: to bring more refined metal into the ecosystem. To do this, his company is trying to automate almost every aspect of a mining operation imaginable.

The last piece is the vehicles. On Thursday, Mariana Minerals announced a partnership with Pronto, a startup that develops self-driving systems for trucks and other off-road vehicles used on construction and mining sites.

It’s Pronto’s first deal since it was acquired by Atoms, the robotics startup run by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. The acquisition reunites Kalanick with Pronto founder Anthony Levandowski, the former Google star self-driving engineer and controversial entrepreneur behind Otto, which Uber acquired in 2016.

The partnership with Pronto will see the autonomous transport trucks begin operating next week at Copper One, a former dormant copper mine in Utah that Mariana bought last year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

But the partnership is about more than just operating autonomous trucks in the space, Caldwell told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Pronto’s autonomous system will be integrated directly into the software Mariana has developed to run the mine, which it calls ‘MineOS’. This will make it possible to dispatch trucks autonomously and coordinate their routes without a human in the loop, he said.

This is part of Caldwell’s larger vision of how a mine should operate in the future. It includes multiple operating systems that use reinforcement learning to automate and ultimately coordinate operations across the mine.

“The big Western mining companies are just like Ford and GM before Tesla. They’re a lot like NASA before SpaceX. They’re a lot like the big defense majors before Anduril,” he said. “The rate at which software is used and technology is brought into the space is basically driven by the operations teams who are not really motivated to change the way they operate, right? If they’re able to create their KPIs, you know, the spreadsheets, the broadcasts, the paper reports — it works fine.”

In Caldwell’s view, this limits a mine’s output and leaves obvious returns on the table. But he believes it is also existential.

“Because Western mining companies are not building a lot of clean new infrastructure, the talent pool has not been actively drawn from it and so the workforce is shrinking,” he said. This means that mines will be stuck trying to do more with less. Caldwell sees Mariana’s software-first approach as the solution to this problem.

This could be good for Mariana, clearly. But if the approach is successful, it could benefit other mines as well. Selling Mariana’s tuning software is on the table, especially once it’s proven, Caldwell said.

But Caldwell said he wasn’t interested in doing that in the first place. “The core business should be selling metals,” he said.

“The company is the level of coordination. And so if you do that, like, at that point, you might as well go and vertically integrate and go into manufacturing the metal, rather than just selling software,” he said. “I think SpaceX would not be a very big selling company [rocket] relanding software at NASA’.

Additionally, owning and operating the mine is crucial to the reinforcement learning loop, Caldwell said — not only because it allows for better control and higher-fidelity data, but also because it could ultimately help inform decisions that are difficult for humans to make right now. Caldwell likened it to how AlphaGo, the chess-playing software developed by DeepMind a decade ago, started making moves that humans hadn’t thought of when trained on enough data.

Despite all this talk of automation, Caldwell said he’s not trying to get people out of mining. Like many other founders working in the industry, he believes that Mariana will really expand this pool of talent that he has already gained.

“Part of it is to reduce labor costs, but that’s not really the goal,” he said. “The goal is actually to enable more productivity with the limited labor pool we have. Automation and autonomy will create more jobs because we’ll have more mines running.”