Open Mineral Founder Boris Eykher breaks down how tech, trade, and pragmatism can reshape global access to critical minerals.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Boris Eykher, CEO & Founder of Open Mineral, about how his company is modernizing commodity trading through technology, risk management, and logistics. The conversation highlights how AI and pragmatic strategy can improve access to critical minerals while supporting producers in emerging markets.
About Open Mineral
Open Mineral (OM) is a digitally native physical commodity trader, whereby the company combines effective use of technology with market intelligence, enabling profitable and efficient trading of raw material commodities. Open Mineral gained a differentiated technology edge in origination, sales, logistics and market intelligence, covering metals with a special focus on energy transition. Collecting, analyzing and running machine learning and AI algorithms on the data, has supported the company’s continued growth, and paved the way for strategic partnerships globally..
Since inception in 2016, the Company , which was established by ex-Glencore traders, has built an industry leading team with combined long-standing expertise in all aspects of raw materials trade and research. The Company developed the fastest growing, profitable physical trading book, allowing for a global presence in Switzerland and Abu Dhabi, as well as other key geographic jurisdictions of raw material supply and consumption. The firm’s track record has already attracted leading institutional investors, including Mubadala Investment Company, amongst others.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have. Boris Eker on the line and he’s CEO and founder over at Open Mineral.
And today’s interview is part of our Milken Global conference series where we interview individuals that attended the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. We interview speakers, we interview the panelists a bunch of in the VIPs. So first off, Boris, welcome to have you on the show.
Thank you very much, Adam. It’s a real pleasure to be here and thank you for having me. Alright, Boris, so I definitely wanna get into what you’re doing over at Open Mineral and talk about, trading critical minerals and securing and trading critical minerals. But before we get into that man, I wanna talk a little bit about the Milken Global Conference.
I understand you’re part of Chairman circle and then also you attended this year. So maybe talk a little bit about your experience with the conference. Yes, I was a panelist at LA’s Milken Event, global Conference. Amazing event. I want to say huge kudos to the organizers of Milken events because they are able to bring a great quality of people together.
And to have candid, real conversation with the real call for action. So you know, majority of the global conferences tend to have a lot of the people saying correct raises that we have heard thousands of times that mean absolutely nothing. And the difference is at Milken . A significant percentage of the people, I would say absolute majority comes from the business side.
Mm. And so the conversation actually becomes, how can we improve something? How can we do something better? It’s super challenging. It’s not about the beautiful story, you know, none of the simple, easy, beautiful words solve them. Mm-hmm. It’s about actual facing real problems and call them things, what they are.
Mm-hmm. And that’s what I love. I, I love about Milken. It’s. Very, very pragmatic approach. And of course, Milken was able to build up an amazing network throughout his career where he’s super well respected yeah. In the financial and the business community. So the caliber of people that you have participating at the events is just a parallel.
Just to give you an example, right? I I still have not posted the picture where I had the El Musk literally speaking one meter away from me. Wow. And nowhere else you would have that, right? Mm-hmm. Where, you know, you’re approaching the, the VP guys, the, the head of the World Bank, right. Who casually stopped by our desk after his speech.
Mm-hmm. Catch up with somebody and, you know, state for 50 million conversation. Right. , You just don’t have it anywhere else. So it’s amazing, the quality. And of course, because you have people of that quality, they actually speak, they’re surrounded by business community. They, so they speak much more about pragmatic solutions.
Mm-hmm. You know, they’re being very, very modest. Right. You’re sitting there. Mm-hmm. You realize what a difference, how successful they are. There is no question about that. Right. And they’re being they, they have humility. They, they speak about their errors, what they tried, what failed, and , it’s just a real.
Canid normal conversation. So that’s super, super impressive. Yeah. And amazing kudos to the, to the whole team for putting that together. Part of the Chairman circle you mentioned in our, when we were warming up for this interview. What is that all about? Talk a little bit about that.
Basically on top of the. Global events that take place, you know in Singapore, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi a couple other places around the world. There are also some smaller private events and where the members frequently host at their houses. Mm-hmm. Small get togethers. And so the conversation is.
As candid as it basically gets, right? Because in, in the private Yeah. In the setting of their private house people get together to really solve issues. They have no reason. They’re super successful. They have nothing to gain. They actually want to have the basically community help organizing, solving the biggest issue.
So, mm, depending on what they’re trying what they’re passionate about it’s about them. Business issues that come up. It’s about the longevity, it’s about the health. For example, cancer is always one of the big topics, education doing the real initiatives to help other people as well. So what people are really, really passionate about, they get together and invite people who might have similar ideas or have similar passion and Wow.
In combining efforts basically. I wanna switch up the topic a bit here. Boris, let’s get into what you’re doing over at Open Mineral. So maybe start off by telling us a little bit more about the company and what you do. Sure. Where we are is a basically commodity trading platform. Mm-hmm. So we have created, created IT solution for trading mineral raw materials.
So and on when once we build it up, we actually learned that the platform, how we envision data originally was not working. So we failed at our first approach. But we, we knew the market is highly in efficient, right? And we were trying to understand what people the participants from the industry are used to receiving.
It’s not just the IT solution that you need, they are used to receiving from the traders financing. The risk management and easy logistics solution where the trader is basically handling everything. And so what we added on top of our platform is the full trading service. So you can think about that in two different ways.
You can think us as the 21st century that is using all the IT possible in order to make things more efficient. Whereas a platform with the full physical trading service in order to solve all the issues and have one step solution for the miners and smat. Hmm. So how long have you been in this space, by the way?
I’m just curious how long you been in this space? After business school I was with Glencorp for eight years. Mm-hmm. And now for more than eight years with Open Mineral. So 16 years in there. And prior to that I was in private equity. Wow. So and I ask that for some context just ’cause we hear a lot about you know, mineral independence or critical min mineral independence.
What, what’s your views on that? Like, what has to be done to achieve that? , It’s a great question. Right. And, you know, coming back to the conferences, you mm-hmm. Or, you know, if you read the articles, a lot of the governments around the world are trying to solve it by introducing some kind of tariffs.
Mm-hmm. What they do not understand is what is being produced. At the end is basically a commodity. Mm-hmm. And if the commodity somewhere else around the world is much cheaper, that it does not matter all the barriers that you’re going to put or any on any particular country, they’ll still sleep in one way or another.
Mm-hmm. And so if you are producing at much higher cost, you’re just not comparative in the long run. Mm-hmm. Under all circumstances, something will change. Something will change in the policy, people will adapt, we’ll move the material with their countries and so on. So the way to think about that. You actually have to be able to secure the raw materials.
Mm-hmm. Basically what the game is about is who has access to the raw materials so they could produce things more efficiently and if they do not have the access to the raw materials and are able to secure them, then they have to secure the refined metals and have stockpiles in the country if they want to have the security for their production.
Hmm. And so what can this look like? Like if somebody’s, creating a policy or strategy, like what kind of, kind of things are you seeing that, that could be effective, let’s say? Of course. So instead of actually wasting money on the CE where you do not achieve much, right?
You are just increasing , the prices internally. Mm-hmm. And by that you are trying to make your industry competitive, but it’s not going to be competitive because the, for example, Chinese are producing at absolutely huge volume. So you are not comparable on the, on the unit cost, and it’s not possible to achieve that.
Mm-hmm. What is much, much more intelligent way. Mm-hmm. Address the issues that the miners have around the world. So for example, where majority of the production is going to be coming, of course from emerging markets, right? Mm-hmm. There is no new copper mine that is going to be like here in New York City, right?
Yeah. They don’t exist. Anything that was simple to extract in a good jurisdictions or of course, has been extracted by that point. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So what do you end up with? More complex mines in harder jurisdictions around the world, right? A lot of them are small, medium sized. So, for example DRC is has one of the largest copper mines that recently came on online.
Mm-hmm. Of course, it’s super hard to get any financing flowing. It’s super hard to get the financing for the development of the mine and to move the materials across the world because there are a lot of perceived and real risk that exists in Africa. So what is the easiest way to do that is actually help the guys on the ground.
Build up or secure they and move the materials around the world. That way you secure the raw materials that is necessary for your economy. Mm-hmm. And you help the emerging markets to develop that. And this is becomes, you are being part of the whole economic ecosystem. So you are fully with the market prices.
So the change in the policy does not affect you. Mm-hmm. You’re actually becoming the part owner of the, either of the mine or the offtake for many years securing raw materials. Hmm. , Switching focus slightly here. What the time we have here. I’m curious about how technology plays a part in this specifically.
Ai machine learning, like, ’cause , I think in, you know, traditionally commodity trading’s considered a a pretty traditional industry. So how does, like, hey, AI and machine learning, like, how does that, how does that play into this equation? Absolutely. So when, when we are trying to. Come up with the set of tools to help miners be more efficient.
One of the things that we were providing them from the start is ability to hedge the prices so that way they can lock up the prices that basically de-risking the project or de-risking the trade or making sure that their budget is being fulfilled, right. Whatever the goal that they have. And of course, everybody was always asking what, you know.
What do you expect of the price to be? And very, very hard to predict the price, right? If we Yeah. Were that intelligent, we, we’ll not be doing that would be anything else, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we were constantly trying to, to think about. With all the data that we have, right. Because of the fact that we have a digital DNA.
Right. We started as a platform. We collected the biggest data lake in the industry, but we were constantly asking ourselves, what is the edge? Mm-hmm. How can we help people and ourselves make better decisions? Yeah. Right. And so instead of at the beginning we were a little bit. Naive or too ambitious, maybe a better way to say it, where we were trying to ask the questions, how can technology solve everything?
Mm-hmm. And then we changed that and just started asking, can technology help solve part of the issue? Mm-hmm. And so the way we are using the machine learning is actually fascinating. We started first with the correlations. Does the price depend on some other variable? For example, if the Federal Reserve releases more liquidity into the system.
Does that mean the price metal prices? Mm-hmm. Or commodity prices overall will go up. And so we start running with multiple, multiple different hypothesis. And then what machine learning is basically allowing you to do is combine a lot of those different signals we call the mal into the portfolio predicting the metal prices.
Mm-hmm. And so once you start running those machine learning models, we. Many, many, hundreds, thousands of signals. It’s actually phenomenal. Good. It beats every single person I have seen, including our head of hedge, myself, and so on, because the system can take into account so many more variables. Yeah. And each one of them is small, but as a combination, of course, it’s remarkably better than Hu than.
Anyone who was on the team in predicting the price. And so we are sharing there with the producers right in, in being able to take a slightly better position and being slightly more right mm-hmm. Than the average. And that, that’s a huge competitive edge. Same thing on ai. Yeah. Instead of just saying like.
How does LLM help in the real world? Right? It’s, it’s super hard to, to find those solutions. But we started basically optimizing first, how can AI help us make slightly better decisions? For example, what, what customers to focus on. Yeah. Right? So we’re running multiple parameters on what to focus or how can we make certain operations more efficient.
For ourselves and the counterpart by sharing the data, by combining the data, how can we predict what is the most likely result that will come out of that based on the whole history that we have? How can we help sign the contract and put together the contract in a more efficient way by. Basically first picking up all the details from the previous contracts mm-hmm.
In these counterpart. And then also giving the most useful suggestions that add the most value to the contract, and so on and so on. So basically we are constantly asking ourselves the question, can technology give a small edge? Mm-hmm. None of that changes the game, but cumulatively it creates a significant edge.
Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. And that, like you, I liked how the way that you worded that to say that like all of these little things like added up become a big thing. Like, like these little pieces that become part of a competitive advantage for the producers and otherwise, like, that’s a big deal.
And I, I’ll, I’ll tell you the funny story. We basically you know I’ve been running open mural for two years. Mm-hmm. And some, one of the established trader. Came at one of the conferences. Introduce yourself. Yeah. I’ve been watching you for two years. You were supposed to be dead a year ago.
You are still alive. You must be doing something right. Tell me exactly what do you do? Come on.
Oh man. That’s a good story. Ah, I love it. Well, Boris, I’ll tell you it’s been great having you on the show today and just learning more about what you’re doing at Open Mineral, and of course all the great work you’re doing with the Milken Institute and being a participant and part of the community.
So appreciate that. If somebody’s listening or watching this and if they want to follow up, if they wanna learn more about Open Mineral or, follow your work, how do they do that? Ww.open mineral.com, and we have all the information there guys, and happy to catch up with anybody who’s interested in our space or having some security or critical minerals going forward.
Amazing. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over and check out Open Mineral. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Boris, thanks again for coming on, man. Perfect. Thank you so much, Adam, for having me.
