An Ex-Tesla engineer’s startup hires Pronto to help develop a copper mine

There is a lot of interest in home design in the United States today. But for Turner Caldwell, who spent almost ten years at Tesla, there is not enough interest in the minerals and metals that lie at the bottom of the business.

That’s why he left Tesla and started Mariana Minerals in 2024. The goal of his startup is to be a modern operation (and refining) that is designed to grow, because Caldwell has one goal: to bring refined metals into the environment. To do this, his company is trying to develop almost every aspect of mining imaginable.

The latest piece is cars. On Thursday, Mariana Minerals announced a partnership with Pronto, a startup that has developed self-driving systems for trucks and other vehicles used in construction and mining.

It is the first partnership that Pronto has made since being discovered by Atoma new robotics project run by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. The acquisition also brings together Kalanick and Pronto founder Anthony Levandowski, a former Google self-driving engineer and the controversial entrepreneur behind Otto, which Uber acquired in 2016.

A deal with Pronto will see autonomous vehicles begin operating next week at Copper One, a former copper mine in Utah Mariana bought it last year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

But the deal is close to being limited to autonomous vehicles, Caldwell told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. The autonomous Pronto system will be directly integrated with the software that Mariana developed to operate the mine, which she calls “MineOS.” This will make it possible to send autonomous vehicles and control their routes without a human, he said.

This is part of Caldwell’s vision for how the mine should be run moving forward. It includes several operating systems that use reinforcement learning to automate, and ultimately, coordinate operations throughout the mine.

“The big western mining companies look like Ford and GM before Tesla. They look like NASA before SpaceX. They look like the big security officials before Anduril,” he said. “The rate at which software is adopted and technology is adopted on the premises is set by the working groups who have no incentive to change the way they work, right? If they can create their own KPIs, you know, spreadsheets, walkie talkies, paper reports – it works well.”

In Caldwell’s view, this reduces the mine’s output and leaves the positives on the table. But they also see it as existence.

“Because western mining companies don’t build a lot of new equipment, the talent pool isn’t attracted to it, so the workforce is shrinking,” he said. This means that mining will be stuck trying to do more with less. Caldwell sees Mariana’s first move as a solution to the problem.

This would be good for Mariana, clearly. But if the strategy is successful, it could help other mines as well. Selling the Mariana docking program is on the table, especially if it’s confirmed, Caldwell said.

But Caldwell said he didn’t want to do that from the start. “The main business should be the steel industry,” he said.

“The company is the unit of integration. And so, if you’re doing this, like, at that time, you can go and integrate, and go to make steel, instead of just selling software,” he said. “I think SpaceX is not going to be the biggest supplier of (rocket) resupply programs to NASA.”

In addition, having this mine is very important for promoting learning, Caldwell said – not only because it allows for better control and higher fidelity, but also because it can ultimately help inform decisions that are difficult for people to see right now. Caldwell likened this to how AlphaGo, a chess program developed by DeepMind a decade ago, started making moves that people had never thought of after a lot of training.

Although this talks about automation, Caldwell said he is not trying to take people out of the mining industry. Like many other startups working in this sector, it is hoped that Mariana will build on the skills that have already been successful.

“Part of this is to reduce labor costs, but that’s not the goal,” he said. “The goal is to make it more productive because of the number of workers we have. Independence, and independence, will bring more jobs, because we will have more mines working.”