Rithmik Solutions aims to build advanced and reliable analytics for mobile mining equipment. The funding will be used to fast-track the commercialisation of the company's Asset Health Analyzer (AHA), its flagship product that it has been developing for three years. Rithmik was a finalist in the technology category of the 2020 Mining Magazine awards its AHA, which uses a multi-tiered machine learning approach to data from pre-existing sensors and available contextual information.
The company said AHA's advanced analytics can increase mobile equipment uptime and extend equipment life, optimise maintenance and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is designed to be easy to deploy and resilient enough for the extreme environments at many mines.
Rithmik noted that mining companies often spend between 20-50% of their operating budgets each year on equipment maintenance, and there can be an even higher financial impact from lost production due to unplanned equipment downtime. AHA is designed to find any issues with equipment before they cause significant damage, preventing unplanned downtime. It is currently being trialled at mine sites in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Quebec, as well as Zambia.
Amanda Truscott, CEO of Rithmik, said: "Our results to date have included detection hours to months in advance of major failures in multiple types and brands of mobile mining equipment across vastly different geographies. Our system has also proven able to uncover chronic inefficiencies along with gaps and inconsistencies in the data itself. Better-running equipment burns less fuel."
The investment leader, Chrysalix Venture Capital, is a technology-focused venture capital firm that aims to bring disruptive innovation to various industries by concentrating its investment on where technology meets physical science. In October 2020, it received investment from Hitachi Construction Machinery.
Alicia Lenis, vice president of Chrysalix Venture Capital, commented: "We were impressed by the Rithmik team's deep technical experience in the space of mobile mining equipment data, across equipment types and OEM brands, and that experience has strongly resonated with their early customers. And when we looked at their approach, which is a scalable AI-first solution that accounts for the extreme variability in mines, we see significant potential that they can crack this tough problem for mining companies."
The other investor, Fonds Ecofuel, is an early-stage venture capital fund that specialises in start-ups that develop and commercialise ‘green' technologies. The company's managing partner, Richard Cloutier, highlighted the sustainability aspect of AHA.
He commented: "Since the Fonds Ecofuel is always looking for cutting-edge innovations that reduce GHG emissions, we have been extremely impressed with Rithmik's latest developments in the mining sector and are happy to support a new portfolio company that provides solutions to climate change."
