Fieldstone Bio Selected for Rio Tinto and Founders Factory Mining Tech Accelerator
Investment marks Fieldstone's first backing from the mining industry
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WOBURN, Mass., Oct. 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Fieldstone Bio, a synthetic biology company building a new class of critical-mineral biosensors, today announced its selection for the Mining Tech Accelerator program, run by Founders Factory in partnership with global mining leader Rio Tinto. Fieldstone joins a cohort of five companies chosen for the four-month program.
The Mining Tech Accelerator backs companies whose technologies can reshape how the industry explores, extracts, and recovers critical materials. Participating companies receive investment and four months of operational support, working directly with Rio Tinto’s technical experts and business leaders and drawing on the miner’s advanced facilities in Western Australia to adapt their technologies to operational mining environments and develop pathways to commercial deployment. The program has become a proving ground for a new generation of mining technology: its portfolio includes companies such as Endolith, Durin, and Terra AI, and past cohorts have been selected from applicant pools of more than 500 companies.
Closing the Ore Body Critical Knowledge Gap
Exploration and mine development decisions run on ore measurements that either arrive slowly or provide only limited datapoints underground. In exploration, drill cores and chip trays are shipped to off-site laboratories, assay results can take one to two months to come back, and teams commit millions of dollars in drilling based on an incomplete picture of the ore body below them. In operating mines, on-site labs return results more quickly, but those results are sparse: grade-control decisions often rest on a single sample per blast hole. As demand grows for copper, lithium, gold and other minerals critical to electrification, the cost of that uncertainty grows with it.
Fieldstone builds measurement systems that put quantitative elemental data where those decisions happen. The company’s platform combines synthetic biology, hyperspectral imaging, and data analysis to detect target elements in geological samples and convert the results into actionable, high spatial resolution measurements that teams can act on while a drill program is still underway.
When elemental data arrives while it can still change the plan, exploration teams can tighten interval selection, waste fewer drill meters, and redirect a program in days rather than waiting on a lab queue. Compounded across an industry where a new mine can take more than a decade to move from discovery to production, faster and denser ore body knowledge shortens the path between finding a deposit and supplying the materials that electrification depends on.
“Ore body knowledge is one of the most valuable and hardest-won assets in mining,” said Patrick Stone, CEO and co-founder of Fieldstone Bio. “Every drilling decision is a bet on an incomplete map, and our platform produces exactly the kind of elemental data that improves that map. This program puts it in the hands of the people who make those bets every day, and their input will sharpen the product we bring to the whole industry.”
For Fieldstone, the program accelerates a product already in motion. The company will work directly with Rio Tinto’s geologists, exploration teams, and technical leadership, tuning its measurement systems to the workflows, data standards, and field conditions of one of the world’s largest mining operators.
“Fieldstone’s approach brings an entirely new measurement capability to exploration,” said Tamryn Barker, Founders Factory Sector Director – Mining & Nature Tech. “The cohort was selected for technologies that can change how the industry finds and characterizes the materials the world needs, faster and more accurately, and Fieldstone fits that mission directly.”
Building Products Inside the Industry They Serve
The accelerator selection deepens Fieldstone’s momentum in mining. In June, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $2 million to Fieldstone, TerraCore, and MIT to develop a novel system for rapid, non-destructive characterization of critical minerals on drill cores. The award, made through ARPA-E’s ROCKS program, pairs Fieldstone’s microbial sensors with hyperspectral imaging from TerraCore, whose scanning experience spans more than two million meters of core, while exploration company Scout Discoveries contributes fresh core from active drill sites for field validation.
“The fastest way to build something miners will use is to build it next to miners,” said Dr. Brandon Fields, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Fieldstone Bio. “Our biosensors started as laboratory demonstrations. Proving them on drill cores and ore samples, inside the sample-handling workflows miners already run, and now within a program built by one of the world’s largest mining companies, is how a scientific capability becomes a product.”
About Fieldstone Bio
Fieldstone Bio builds measurement systems that combine synthetic biology, hyperspectral imaging and data analysis to measure chemicals and elements in soil, water and geological samples. Founded in 2023 out of MIT and based in Woburn, Massachusetts, Fieldstone is developing products for mineral exploration and working with federal agencies across health, energy and national security to translate emerging biotechnology into operational tools. Learn more at fieldstone.bio.
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