“A few startups are bucking the trend. The most prominent is KoBold Metals, a Bill Gates-backed minerals exploration company and Silicon Valley’s first mining unicorn, a term for a privately held startup valued at over a billion dollars.“KoBold, an industrial affiliate of Mineral-X that has financially backed the latter and collaborated on its research, is developing machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to scour the Earth’s crust for new deposits of lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel.“Its staff of about 200 employees includes roughly equal numbers of geoscientists, data scientists, and software engineers, according to KoBold president Josh Goldman.“While a few years back recruiters at KoBold might have needed to spend a lot of time explaining why the company’s mission mattered, today “it’s in the zeitgeist,” according to Goldman.“’Everybody’s worried about lithium supply, everybody’s worried about copper,’ he added.“Goldman acknowledged that potential young hires often have ‘some hitches about joining a mining company.’ But he said KoBold is typically able to assuage their concerns by explaining its ethical principles, which include only doing exploration and extraction in places where it can get strong community buy-in. ‘That is a very frequent topic of conversation,’ Goldman said.”