Minviro said the investment will enable plans to deepen its presence in key markets, including Asia, Australia and the Americas, and develop local operational capacity there.
Robert Pell, founder and chief executive, told Mining Magazine that his company was founded to plug a gap in the market for mining-focused LCA services - at a time when they are becoming crucial for investor confidence.
"In both LCA service and related software, there's been a real lack of sector-specific tool", said Pell.
"A generalist LCA practitioner can't really go in, talk with an engineer and develop a collaborative solution for [mine] impact reduction."
The company's MineLCA offering is a SaaS platform that enables actors in minerals and metals supply chains to quantify and create mitigation scenarios and action plans for their environmental footprints.
Miniviro has already succeeded in signing up big-name clients, and counts Tesla, Pilbara, Livent, and South32 among its customers.
"Without a tool like a lifecycle assessment, miners are ‘fighting blind', you don't know where your hotspots are," adds Pell.
He adds that while battery metals being sought for the energy transition are at the "sharp end" of LCA demand, that regulations are evolving in Europe, downstream at the product level, that will lead to more requirements for lifecycle assessment across all metals.
"Product environmental footprints are being devised for all sorts of products sold in the European market. … There is the carbon border adjustment mechanism, the US's inflation Reduction Act (IRA), - all these kinds of pressures are requiring more lifecycle assessment data."
Supply chains will come sharply into focus as critical mineral legislation spreads, he adds.
"Everybody talks about the material shortage. But if you are able to find materials, which happen to be in the worst 20% of the supply chain, in terms of climate change impact, you might not be able to sell that on the European market by 2030, or 2025."
He also describes the US's IRA as a watershed moment for mining's midstream in the West.
"It's an incredibly unprecedented step and is having significant impacts, globally. European Gigafactory companies will preferentially go to the US because of the cost competitiveness created by the IRA. And I think what you're gonna see is similar policies for other western regions. "
