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What are rules for if not to be bent from time to time?

PreSeed Now has a firm ‘UK startups only’ rule. It keeps things simple and focused. But today’s startup, while founded in the UK, has recently relocated to San Francisco.

We’re sharing it with you anyway, because Thunderstone has really interesting technology that is well worth knowing about.

But first:

• If university spinouts are your thing, it’s worth checking out Dealroom.co’s European Spinouts Report 2025.

• It’s been created in partnership with Atlantic, MITO Technology, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Oxford Science Enterprises and Northern Gritstone.

– Martin

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How Thunderstone plans to shake up the mining industry

Mining is typically an ugly business, involving digging huge chunks out of the landscape and lots of explosives.

So what if you could extract metals from the ground without the actual mine? That’s the promise of Thunderstone.

“Mine sites are terribly inefficient and we don't have the metals our energy transition requires,” says founder and CEO Eric Wasson Burns.

He explains that metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt tend to be dispersed over a large area underground. So rather than blasting the rocks and then processing them to access the metals, Thunderstone can extract the metal in a far more efficient way.

“Our technology fundamentally transforms what the mine site looks like. We keep the rocks underground. Instead of excavating with bombs and creating a bunch of waste, we can build out a process that's clean, cheaper, and faster, using what we like to call ‘underground lightning’,” Burns says.

This ‘underground lightning’ (the ‘thunder among the stones’, if you like) is high-voltage electricity that increases permeability underground. Fluids can then be pumped into the ground to extract metals in a far more efficient way than would otherwise be possible.

“We use a proprietary high-voltage electrical pulse. We're talking about 200,000 volts, 400,000 volts,” Burns explains.

“We recently measured the power that we're putting into the system and it's about 18 gigawatts worth of electricity, about equivalent to 13.5 million homes worth of electricity [but] it's a very short time that we're pulsing. But each time we pulse, we iteratively stimulate the ground.

“It may or may not look like cracks [in underground rock formations]. With a lot of our target materials, it actually just changes the permeability without cracking the material, allowing us to get fluids where they couldn't previously enter.

“Mine sites today require about 3% of the world's electricity... And taking big rocks and grinding them down into small rocks just so they can sprinkle acid on top and dissolve out those metals. We can avoid that ginormous amount of energy by leaving the rocks in the ground.”

The story so far

Burns describes himself as a “fourth-generation scientist”

“I come from a family of scientists… so I guess it was kind of without question I would enter the science field. I started in the laboratory when I was around 16 and stayed in the laboratory until I was 28, serving almost every single branch of chemistry, starting in biological computational chemistry. I then made a hard pivot towards solar fuels.

“The foundation for my curiosity and motivation was ‘how do we solve some of the world's most urgent issues around the climate? My goal was to build out technologies that can help solve for these critical problems.”

Having previously run ventures exploring carbon capture and recycling, he joined UK-based Deep Science Ventures to explore climate-related deep tech startup ideas.

“One thing I really appreciated during my time at Deep Science Ventures was that instead of pushing out a technology that comes from the laboratory, we were able to purposely invent what a technology needs to have in order to solve for critical bottlenecks in humanity's future.

“I was working in critical minerals, methane decarbonisation, water scarcity. I found myself interested in solving what I found out is the key bottleneck for solving our critical sustainability requirements… metals.

“In order to supply our energy future, we need a lot more metals. We don't know what exact metals we need to have, and so we need to solve for this fundamental bottleneck in metals. Supply and demand aren't matching up. We're well behind targets and mine sites themselves aren't scalable.

“Every single mine site spends too much energy, too much time, too much cost, and too much environmental damage by blowing out the ground, destroying the environment, and spending way too much at the same time.”

And it’s from that problem that Thunderstone was born, with Burns taking the role as CEO.

Burns says the startup has proven that it can reproducibly demonstrate increased permeability, and that it can do so with predictability and control.

While founded in the UK, the startup has recently relocated to San Francisco, where Burns has been building out the team to deliver on its promise.

“This technology requires an unusual blend of creative scientists and engineers which combines both plasma fusion pulse power people, and people that know how to build startups and understand the mining industry to ultimately de-risk this technology from fundamental science concepts, and that's the team that we have.”

Burns says the startup still has an R&D position open.

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