University of British Columbia
2329 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada
Overview
The University of British Columbia is a global centre for research and teaching, consistently ranked among the 40 best universities in the world. Since 1915, UBC’s West Coast spirit has embraced innovation and challenged the status quo. Its entrepreneurial perspective encourages students, staff and faculty to challenge convention, lead discovery and explore new ways of learning. At UBC, bold thinking is given a place to develop into ideas that can change the world. As one of the world’s top research universities, for more than a century the University of British Columbia has created positive change here and abroad. Today, centered on our two major campuses — the Vancouver campus and the Okanagan campus — we attract, nurture and proactively transform more than 58,000 students from Canada and 140 countries.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 1
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 8
Sector focus
- Civil Engineering
- Education
- Universities
Investment portfolio
- Ideon Technologies
Led · Seed · Jul 2020
Ideon builds proprietary muon detectors and a software stack that use muon tomography to create subsurface images, enabling more targeted mineral exploration. Its hardware has undergone about a 50x miniaturization, shrinking from roughly the size of a small car to units that fit in boreholes the diameter of a coffee cup. In case studies the company reports a 10x reduction in drilling compared with conventional exploration workflows. Ideon attributes recent commercial viability to advances in AI, cloud computing and semiconductors that allow processing of high-volume datasets. The company is already working with large mining firms including Glencore and Vale. Ideon says it will use the new funding to expand the team, build out its software stack and further refine its proprietary detectors. The company is based in British Columbia and has productized more than a decade of R&D and field trials. Ideon Technologies develops a discovery platform that uses cosmic-ray muon tomography, integrating proprietary detectors, imaging systems, inversion technologies, and artificial intelligence to deliver x-ray-like visibility up to 1 km underground. The company’s core product is a bore-hole detector designed to fit industry-standard drill-holes and improve geologists’ field-of-view; customer-sponsored field trials have driven uptake in an early access program. Ideon says its technology can reduce exploration drilling and associated carbon emissions by tenfold while identifying targets with 95% or higher certainty. The breakthrough targets the global mineral exploration market (>$12B USD) and also has applications in oil & gas (including SAG-D), critical infrastructure, and national security where projects are already underway. Ideon will use the new capital to develop and release the bore-hole detector in 2021 and plans to hire several new roles in the Vancouver area. Founded in 2013 as a spin-off from TRIUMF, Ideon positions itself as a commercial pioneer in muon tomography for subsurface resource discovery.