Jiren founder Ted Feldmann is automating diamond drilling rigs to solve the mining labor crisis

Summary

Ted Feldmann, founder of Jiren, is building and operating automated diamond drilling rigs for mineral exploration — a roughly $2–3 trillion industry that has seen almost no Silicon Valley investment and is currently facing a severe labor shortage.

The core workflow Feldmann describes is capital-intensive and slow. Junior mining companies raise money on public markets — typically Canada's TSXV or Australia's ASX — and spend most of it on diamond drilling to build a 3D geological model of a potential deposit. A good shift covers about 50 feet in 12 hours, meaning a 1,000-foot hole takes roughly a month and costs around $100 per foot. The data from hundreds of such holes feeds into a subsurface model that determines whether a deposit is worth developing or selling to a larger miner.

Why build from scratch

Feldmann spent six months trying to retrofit an existing rig before concluding it was unworkable. Chinese rigs cost under $100,000 but fall apart in the field. Western rigs cost around $500,000, and manufacturers were too slow to partner with and had their own half-hearted autonomy efforts underway. Jiren ended up designing its own rig, buying only the drill head, foot clamp, and rams off the shelf, with the structure proprietary.

The company is paid per meter drilled — the same model as any other drilling contractor — so exploration companies take on no technology risk. That go-to-market framing is deliberate: mining companies are deeply risk-averse and won't bet on new technology locked into their capex for a decade.

The autonomy roadmap

Jiren's first rig is starting its pilot with a gold explorer in Nevada within weeks of recording. It collects surface-level drilling data — weight on bit, RPM, fluid pressure, rate of penetration, torque — which will train a deterministic autopilot system, eventually moving to machine learning once enough drilling data exists. Downhole sensor data doesn't exist yet; Feldmann says relevant datasets simply aren't available online.

Today, a conventional rig runs with three people: a driller reading gauges and adjusting parameters, plus one or two helpers loading rods, pulling core samples, and managing fluid additives. Jiren's near-term target is rod handling automation and a first-generation drilling parameter adjustment system on its current rig, with a more capable version starting construction in a couple of months. The goal over time is to reduce the crew from three to one person operating a fleet of rigs from a safe distance — though someone will always need to be on site for site prep, consumable delivery, and core sample pickup, at least over the next five years.

The labor problem

Feldmann frames automation primarily as a workforce solution rather than a cost play. The mining industry doesn't have enough drillers, and the shortage is structural. Labor cost savings are real, but the industry physically cannot run enough rigs to meet demand without reducing the headcount required per rig.

Rare earths and trade war tailwinds

Before founding Jiren, Feldmann worked at MP Materials, which operates the only rare earths mine in the United States at Mountain Pass, California, producing roughly 15% of global rare earth supply and refining about half of that domestically. Following China's export restrictions, MP Materials announced it is redirecting shipments away from China to Japan and Korea via a Sumitomo offtake agreement.

Feldmann is cautiously optimistic for western producers but clear-eyed about the limits. The US has reasonable deposits of light rare earths like neodymium and praseodymium but is short on heavy rare earths — terbium and dysprosium in particular — and will need to import from allies, with Brazil and Vietnam as the most plausible partners. There is no known domestic substitute ready to scale.

Brand as a hiring tool

Jiren has leaned into marketing aggressively for a company that has barely launched, running billboards near SpaceX's Hawthorne facility with the line "you can't have rocket science without rock science." Feldmann is explicit about the logic: mining has almost no companies that invest in brand, so even a small effort stands out enough to attract engineers from aerospace and drillers from the industry who describe Jiren as the only cool company in mining. Hiring is the constraint the brand is designed to solve.