Lithium demand is growing roughly 18% annually through 2030, pulled by EVs and a stationary storage market now expected to absorb more than a third of global lithium supply by decade’s end. After an 80 to 90% price collapse in 2023 and 2024, the market is tightening again: high-cost projects have shut down, new supply has stalled, and a structural deficit is forming in 2026 and 2027. With Chinese processors controlling over 85% of the refining stack, Western buyers need a secure supply in stable jurisdictions. Speed and geography matter as much as grade.
The standard exploration timeline is five to six years.
Atana is an AI-driven mineral discovery platform that applies oil-and-gas reservoir engineering to brine-based mineral systems, cutting exploration dramatically. We are excited to invest in Atana and support their proven approach to unlocking faster, more efficient exploration, starting with lithium.
The bottleneck: exploration built for the wrong geology
Brine-based lithium exploration is slow, not because the resources are hard to find, but because the industry applies hard-rock methods to fluid systems. Conventional exploration demands 120 to 150 wells per project, multiple drilling campaigns, and seasonal validation cycles before a resource can be certified and sold. Decades of subsurface field data, from well logs to geological surveys to regulatory archives, sit in physical libraries: unstructured, undigitized, and disconnected from any modern analytics workflow. New projects effectively start from scratch.
The result is a discovery-to-production timeline that averages over 16 years globally. That pace doesn’t serve an energy transition running on a different clock.
Atana’s breakthrough: O&G methods adapted to critical minerals
Atana’s platform is built on millions of pages of digitized subsurface records accumulated over the years. On top of that data foundation, the company runs 40+ AI and machine learning workflows to identify high-probability brine targets before a single well is drilled. When the team drills, it applies petrophysics, fluid flow modeling, and pressure analysis borrowed from upstream O&G: methods that let one well generate information across a three to seven-kilometer radius, compared to the 100 meters typical of hard-rock exploration.
The practical output is a significant compression of time and capital. Atana derisks a project with roughly 13 wells instead of 120 to 150. The business model captures value at multiple points: early land transactions, asset sales at resource definition, and retained royalties on future production. The platform extends beyond lithium to magnesium, boron, rare earths, helium, hydrogen, and geothermal heat.
Why now, and why Atana
The team is the clearest reason to back this company. CEO Tom Wilson spent 15 years in upstream O&G at Hess and Star Energy, managing $1.5 billion in drilling programs across the US, Australia, West Africa, and the North Atlantic. After his Stanford MBA, he was the first industry hire at Lilac Solutions, scaling operations from seed to Series C. CFO David Edwards brings 15 years of energy investment banking at UBS and Tristone, including M&A and capital raises across complex resource deals, followed by two CFO roles at PE-backed O&G companies. Head of Exploration Thomas Goode led the Jama discovery at Lilac and opened the company’s country entries into Germany and Poland.
The timing is structural. The lithium market correction removed supply precisely when downstream demand was accelerating. ESS demand forecasts were revised upward by 50% for 2025. With high-cost projects offline and upstream capex slowing, the window for fast, low-cost discovery in Western jurisdictions is open now, and Atana’s pipeline of projects across the US, Europe, and Chile is positioned exactly where buyers need supply.
This investment fits directly into Sunna’s thesis: backing companies that solve physical bottlenecks in the energy transition through technical and operational depth. We are excited to co-invest alongside Lowercarbon, Earthshot, Borusan Ventures, Overture, Redwood Climate Capital, Verve Ventures, WovenEarth, among others. We believe Atana is one of the few exploration platforms in this space built for venture-scale returns.
Atana joins a growing group of Sunna portfolio companies working on the physical infrastructure the energy transition requires.