173. They Put the Ore in Organisms: Liz Dennett’s Microbial Mining at Endolith

Liz We know that microbes are earth's oldest miners, these little microbial minions. Why are we not intentionally using it?

Erum Hey, Carl, how's it going?

Karl It's going super well, IAM, how about you?

Erum We had some madness working with different types of software, trying to get a PowerPoint out.

Karl software's in the news every week and Thro was in the news.

Karl Microsoft was in the news defending philanthropic, but we had some PowerPoint fails. You want to talk about it a little bit, because I know this is gonna be familiar to many of our listeners.

Erum I think people feel this intimately depends on, Who you're working with and like messaging lab, you work with different, clients that use different software and we use different software and then we work with different partners on visual brand design and different aspects of comms and they use different software.

Karl So this is always the challenge between using. PowerPoint, Google Slides, and I think one of the challenging things, Carl, and this is, you and I had [00:01:00] this crazy back and forth because you and I talked via chat Yeah, Google Chat. It's part of the Google Suite.

Erum Yeah. The challenge is PowerPoint is the name of the software, but it's also the name of the file, like PPT is the name of the file. And then when you're talking about Google Slides, we talk about slides, but then it's also the name of the actual like piece of the PowerPoint, which is the slide.

Erum And you and I were trying to go back and forth on how to,

Erum transfer PowerPoint into Google Slides. And it was so maddening because we had received a PowerPoint from a, our visual design partners and they had, customized fonts and animations and all these, remarkable things

Erum but. Just to convert it. Things start failing. And they actually had used Acrobat initially and then they converted into PowerPoint. which then we converted into slides or I did, because I don't have PowerPoint on my desktop, I just never needed it really. 'cause I was able to do the minimal, on [00:02:00] google slides, everything, converted pretty well for me for some of our previous projects, but this one's a little bit more of a mature, sophisticated project, and it was just you, me, going back and forth and like the animations weren't working and the fonts were not integrating well, and I was trying to tell you well, the PowerPoint isn't working for me. And you're like, no, I can open up PowerPoint. I'm like, the file. But I was like, no, I mean PowerPoint, the software. And it was just this crazy Abbott Costello, software fail thing that was happening. And I'm like, oh my God. it's 2026 and we can't convert files. This is just like the classic office thing. It's just like when the printer isn't working.

Karl Yeah. I mean, just, to be clear for our listeners, the file went from Acrobat to PowerPoint from PowerPoint to slides, and then we kept it in PowerPoint because that's what the client required.

Karl Well, the lesson is eam. You need to add PowerPoint to your computer.

Erum Yeah, I mean, the lesson is, we need software to be compatible with each other. That's the [00:03:00] biggest thing. I'm like, okay, all of this ai, and we can't have software that converts information in a high fidelity way when it comes to animations and, high design fonts. This isn't an Erum problem, this is a software problem.

Karl It's a, it's a global problem. We're not the only one suffering from it. We just happen to go through this. And like you said, it was like Abbott and Costello. So,

Erum but anyway, it's a funny little office story, we always have these little funny things happen to us, but, here we are on the Grow Think podcast, we do talk about biotech and how that's influencing the economy and our work life. So this was a little story for you.

Karl Exactly.one of the great things about what we do is we get to work globally with a lot of different people, and I think one of the joys for both of us is when we actually get to meet clients in person, people who we've worked with for a really long time. So for us, it shows how important it is to be able to meet people, look them in the eye, sit across the table from them, have some food or drink and we, love meeting our clients. And we just had a really great client meeting but it's [00:04:00] always great. I mean, we talk about it all the time. AI is great, but people want to connect with other people.

Erum So, I mean, it was amazing to speak with this client because we work with them on like the huge rebrand. We're doing all these, great projects with them and to be able to sit down across with them and talk to 'em about their families and their interests and just to get to know their motivations better actually helps align the projects more because then you start understanding a little bit about how they decide on certain aspects of business or design. I took a lot, away not just about who they are as people, but how they think. And I think it will make our work richer because we had that more intimate experience. that's more relaxed and we got to know them more as people than just clients.

Karl Absolutely. Yeah. And you, Erum, were just on a panel. I think you mentioned it a couple weeks ago. How'd that panel go?

Erum I was on this panel, it was, a biomedical, showcase and, it was about innovators that are making unique things [00:05:00] in the world of biomedicine. and the panel was great. It was me and, three other people, gentlemen. They're mostly men. so when we talked about fundraising, go to market strategies, and, I also like to share, what we're doing in our world besides what's outside of the world of biomedicine and biopharma.

Erum So I was sharing a little bit about, the world Desci and people are very interested in that. And I gave 'em an example of hair dao. And so I'm explaining what HairDAO is and I was like, you know what HairDAO is? they're working to. Treat baldness and I look over to the guy next to me and I was like talking to him and he was bald and I just was like, oh, I didn't mean to look at you when I said baldness and everyone just started cracking up and he was like, no, no. I was like, I would love tomeet HairDAO. I was like, that was a total fail. People knew that. It was like genuinely, I felt mortified because I didn't mean to say that, you needed to talk to hairdo, but I was like, oops. But. point is that I, really appreciated the opportunity to share more about what's going on in the world of healthcare [00:06:00] beyond, the traditional systems that we have. 'cause a lot of people are frustrated with those systems. And also to make light of these conversations that can be really jam packed. Talking about fundraising of, you know, biotech companies and what are different models of doing that and the go-to market strategies and you can get really dense. But I think just talking about a innovation and throwing a little humor in there, even though it wasn't intentional, but I turn that around.

Karl This is in front of everybody. So everybody heard this? Yeah.

Erum Yeah, everyone then came up to me like, that's so funny. I'm like, did not plan for that. And the panelist that was next to me was such a good sport. Oh my God. he was really great.

Karl So funny. So, on the Grow Everything Podcast, we talk about alternate funding mechanisms like desci, and we tend to focus on how biotechnology is changing the entire economy. Today we're gonna be talking about mining. So how does mining relate to biology? Erum, what's the connection?

Erum Well, mining and microbes, I mean, those are two things that have been evolving. Well, not [00:07:00] necessarily minerals and metals, but biology has been evolving with minerals and metals for billions of years. And what's really interesting, and I was looking into this, is that the human body relies on minerals and metal, specifically copper. And we are gonna be talking about copper a lot today. But what I thought was really interesting was that, adult humans carry about 70 to 150 milligrams of copper in our bodies. And it's mostly in the liver, brain, heart, kidneys, and skeletal muscles. And it's really important for very specific processes like energy production and metabolism. it's important for our connective tissues.

Erum it helps with production of collagen and elastin. There's antioxidant defense Helps, regrow neurotransmitters, which is really important. And also, melanin production and different types of, pigmentation that we have in our bodies.

Erum So I thought that was really interesting because, as humans evolved, our [00:08:00] bodies. Brought copper along into our biological systems and continues to play a vital role. But this isn't about copper in the human body. This is about copper and our need for copper for electrification.

Karl I'll just add to what you were talking about because you're talking about copper and I'm thinking of all these other minerals that we sometimes take, trace minerals that are supposed to be in our food, zinc, magnesium, selenium. there's probably a bunch of other ones and they're super important for, electron transfer. They have very specific goals as they are, as, you just mentioned when it comes to electrification.

Karl Mining has actually been in the news. This is something I follow because of the importance of lithium and copper for electrification. And I just saw news that a 16 Z invested to reopen a mine in Utah, a copper mine, and, Copper is one of these essential critical minerals in the United States because AI and electricity require a lot of [00:09:00] copper.

Erum Yeah. The US consumes about 3 million metric tons of copper each year, and that's the equivalent of 10 Empire State buildings, so lots and lots of copper. And in 2024, there was $242 billion that were generated through the sales of Copper and it's projected to be $340 billion by 2030. So that's a 6.5 annual growth rate. And this is, information from Grandview Research. We'll have a link in the show notes to that, but high demand, high value.

Erum And it's interesting where copper comes from. A third of it comes from recycling. A third comes from domestic mines, and a third of it is imported. So copper is on the critical minerals list. This list where we need to make sure that we have abundance supply because it runs our products and our economy, and our electricity, and our energy. And of course, in the United States, um, especially today, we're looking to localize production. So that means faster permitting, [00:10:00] access to grants, and interesting new technologies.

Karl So that brings us to today's guest. Liz Dennet. She is the founder and CEO of Endo Lith and She and her team are using biology's intelligence to improve mineral recovery in mining environments,

Karl So this is biotechnology that is built for rocks, not just a lab. I love this because this speaks to my dirty biology, thesis, and Liz actually had worked at Cemvita, who has been on the podcast before, she's also at Amazon Web Services, and her work has spanned, subservice genomics, open source data platforms and industrial scale deployment. And so one of the, things I love about Liz is Liz grew up in a really small town. Alaska and that meant that she wasn't just surrounded by wild landscapes. Alaska is very resource rich and so she grew up with a sense of curiosity and this refusal to believe [00:11:00] things are too hard and that sense has guided her ever since. So we're very excited to introduce Liz Dennet of Lyth to the Grow Everything Podcast.

Erum Liz Dennett, welcome to the Grow Everything podcast. We are so excited to have you on.

Liz I am so excited to be here. Thank you both so very much.

Erum Yay. Well, we did a little background digging on you, and you have such an impressive background. There's so much you have done and even from the earliest days, you grew up in Alaska, so you're surrounded by these wild landscapes and.

Erum We'd love to know, like when you look back, can you trace a thread from that environment to founding a company that works at the intersection of biology and mining? We'd love to know a little bit about your story.

Liz Absolutely. So growing up in Alaska, I think it fundamentally shapes how you think about natural resources because energy, infrastructure, minerals, they're not [00:12:00] these abstract concepts where you're in some big city.

Liz They determine whether things work and you know people that are working for those net extractive industries. My dad was an oil and gas geologist. Most of my friends as parents were working at Red Dog Mine. And that helps you think about, one, that it's more concrete, but two, you start to think about systems thinking really early.

Liz Also, Alaska's massive and the remote places, if you're up in the bush, it tends to force you to think about logistics and geology and energy and people, especially given the really rich history of native communities there as one system. I was so grateful to spend most of my time growing up, out in the wilderness, camping and fishing and just.

Liz Being in those environments where you see the actual rocks that produce these minerals. So it's, probably the most impactful thing that I've done in my life was be born in the right state at the right time.

Karl So Amazing. it just sounds so beautiful. I've never been, but you work in the mining industry and mining and microbes don't usually show up in the same sentence. Was there a moment when you realized that [00:13:00] biology could meaningfully, improve? Mineral recovery, not just in theory, but in the real world.

Liz Yeah, so it actually started when I went to grad school for astrobiology, and I just became fascinated by the fact that microbes have been interacting with the planet for billions of years.

Liz Specifically metals. All of the oxygen we breathe is due to microbes being around billions and billions of years ago and taking that to the present day, it really raised that question about if biology participates in the systems. We know that microbes are earth's oldest miners, these little microbial minions.

Liz Why are we not intentionally using it? And the reality is that people have been trying to use it for decades. but it hasn't always been as effective and we weren't able to control the processes in a way that we're able to do that now.

Erum and before we dive into the science, could you help our listeners visualize what Endo Lth actually does?

Erum So if we stood at one of your mining sites, what would we see happening differently because biology's involved.

Liz So honestly, it would [00:14:00] look. Pretty much the exact same, which is really important from a go-to market perspective and from ensuring safety and environmental re regulations. But essentially what we do is we use microbes and we deploy them onto heap leaches.

LIzette Hey guys. Liz just introduced us to heap leaching. That's a mining process where crushed rock is piled into massive heaps, think stadium sized, and then a chemical solution is sprayed over it to dissolve out the metal. The liquid seeps down, collects the metal, and gets processed. It's slower than traditional methods, but more scalable and less energy intensive big piles.

LIzette Slow chemistry, valuable output.

Liz Now, if you haven't seen a heap leach, what they do is they take low grade ore, typically around 0.3% copper. They crush it, and pilot is high, is your favorite sports ball arena since we're in Denver. Imagine a power stadium just fill to the brim and then they [00:15:00] lay over these irrigation pipes that spray or release sulfuric acid on there.

Liz And so that sulfuric acid percolates down the copper slowly dissolves, it gets collected, and then electroplated out. This is actually important because in a lot of traditional copper extraction methods, you have a smelter. It's very environmentally noxious, and you have to extract those to somewhere like China to get it in a usable copper product.

Liz Whereas with Hydrometallurgy, the copper, the cathode is the end goal right there. so that is how it exists today.

LIzette You just heard hydrometallurgy. That's the process of extracting metals using liquid chemistry instead of high heat, rather than melting rock in a smelter, you dissolve the metal into a solution and recover it from there. It uses less energy and can be done closer to the mining site. Same goal, different pathway.

Liz The endolith one will look different because. We will have our little endo lith shipping containers or deployments on site. What we do is we release microbes in with that sulfuric [00:16:00] acid.

Liz They're microbial communities, they're derived from naturally occurring microbial communities, and everything that happens exists within the heap. And if you're a mining operator, you just get more cooperative played out. If the end of the day we are very busy collecting data, bringing it to the cloud, tweaking our microbes.

Liz On the whole, it looks pretty much the same.

Karl And can you tell us like what's the percentage yield difference, that you get? And maybe we're gonna talk about this later, but I'm really curious to know, when you do that initial irrigation and you're pulling down the sulfuric acid versus adding the microbes to, to the pile.

Liz right now, typically systems get between 20 and 50% of the copper out. Part of that is it's a very nuanced electron flow and you have all kinds of things happening and it's really this old school set it and forget it mentality. With microbes in lab, we are seeing 1.7 to 1.9 times more copper coming out in all of our heap relevant lab testing in the field, talking to customers.

Liz If we can [00:17:00] get 10% more copper, not 70, not 90, not 60, but if we can just get 10% more, that's monumental. And part of the reason is 'cause the mines have already been dug. They're already in production. And so every bit we tweak out becomes less future liabilities, less potential asset. Mine drainage. And it means that we're able to produce it here over in Arizona, over in Utah, somewhere where we have really good safety track records.

Karl That's awesome. And generally mining is seen as a rigid industry, mechanical, extractive, but you're throwing living systems into the equation. What has been the biggest surprise you guys have seen? cause biology is, not predictable.

Liz For us, we use communities. I think my outgoing voicemail message, if you call me, says something like Teamwork makes the dream work.

Liz And it said that since I first watched Blades of Glory 20 years ago. But it's true, we are using microbial communities. So they have those teamwork, they have natural redundancies built in there. If we were using one organism, it would be much more fragile. And that's how some of the early [00:18:00] approaches didn't work so well is they put one little microbial minion into the field and hope all went well.

Liz Whereas we have robust communities that we can tweak and monitor and change over time. as I mentioned several times, I'm an astrobiologist, so you have to forgive. I always go back to the earth is old. Many things have evolved. Early earth was so much more hostile than any of these modern mine heaps.

Liz And so it's not about if the microbes can survive, it's how we guide them towards economically useful outcomes inside this massive, preexisting industrial system.

Erum Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious because you mentioned, you know, you introduce these microbes with sulfuric acid, which sounds like it's not friendly to living things,

Liz No, these guys love it. We work with Extremophiles, and so these live at phs one, I mean, pH one to two is their sweet spot. They also thrive in temperatures from 30 degrees all the way up to 60 degrees.

LIzette Let's pause for a second. Liz just talked about extremophiles. These are microbes that thrive [00:19:00] in extreme environments, high acidity, high heat, places where most life wouldn't survive. In this case, they actually love sulfuric acid. What feels harsh to us is normal to them. They're built for the extremes.

Liz So we are not talking about the types of like. fungi or heterotrophs, if you're familiar with it, that you'd use typically in industrial scale precision fermentation.

Liz These are the rogue warriors that have been around in extreme environments, which is cool because the earth has been like that for billions of years. So they've had so long to shape these metabolic processes to evolve these gene cassettes.

Erum so you've said that biotech. It's built for the rocks, not just the lab. what are the biggest challenges in translating elegant biological theory into messy legacy mining Heaps.

Liz Oh, it's such a good question. Most biotechnology systems are designed for these very controlled and build environments.

Liz You know, bioreactors, clean rooms, carefully managed inputs, but mining looks nothing [00:20:00] like that, and you cannot expect it to look like that is a feature, not a bug. Ore bodies are very heterogeneous. Temperatures vary across the heap. pH changes, eh changes. Fluid flow is not uniform. So the technology for mining has to operate and thrive within these physical systems.

Liz So what that means is our approach has to do a few things. One is we have to be able to monitor the biology, know what's happening. We have to be able to adapt the conditions, and then we have to ultimately have an input that enables better recovery. So it's not like running lab ecosystems or more domesticated bugs.

Liz It's really more about managing the ecosystem as a whole, the chemistry, the biology, all of the variables. And that actually, that's where the fun is. That is so much more fun than just one model organism creating precision fermentation products like this is where the cool, cool science is from my perspective.

Karl Yeah, we talk about dirty biology because when you're outside of the lab, biology just works surrounded by the environment. So this really speaks to that.

Liz Yeah. [00:21:00] Resource systems too, when I think about 'em is they operate across several dimensions. The geology in the world determines where the metals are, the chemistry determines how they dissolve and how they interact.

Liz And the biology then can influence the reactions and the reaction kinetics. And then underneath that, we are coupling it with cloud native data. Things like SCADA systems to allow operators to observe and guide the process. And I mentioned earlier that this technology couldn't have existed earlier. This technology could not have existed a few years ago.

Liz It really is leveraging advance advances in genomics and cloud computing and operational excellence, which is such a fun place to be.

Karl It's super exciting because like I think most people would think of mining as being a very conservative in industry and really for good reason. You know, if you make some kind of operational mistake, it's probably very costly. How do you navigate the tension between moving fast and getting an operator to trust? Is doing. And what does a successful partnership look like?

Liz That [00:22:00] is a very important question because mining customers are very slow by default, because if they move incorrectly, someone can get hurt, the environment can get damaged.

Liz These are not, oh, our run yields were a little bit lower. These are. Very, very baseline existential risks. And for me, I am later in my career, I finished my PhD about 15, 12 to 15 years ago. which means that our approach that we're taking is not a move. Fast break things. We don't wanna be the disruptive lever within the mining industry.

Liz first off, that could result in complications for safety or for integrity and things like that. And we don't wanna do that. So I am the only non-mining person on my leadership team. Christie, who leads technology and operations, has 30 years at Freeport building some of the biggest heap bleaches in the world.

Liz Andrew, our CFO slash CCO was at BP for 25 years working. On broad global systems, I am the most inexperienced in regards to [00:23:00] mining. I've worked at many oil and gas sites throughout my career, but it is a very unique. Culture we've built where we need to put safety above everything else, and that means both physical safety.

Liz We all recently did our MSHA training, but also the psychological safety as a startup to have people come to me and say, Hey Liz, we actually don't want you in this customer meeting because you are a purple haired PhD that's going to geek out about microbial minions, and that's not what the GM on the mine site wants to talk about.

Liz I, I always tell investors and everyone that we have three core pillars of our culture. One is safety is first, it's a non-negotiable. Two is that we love critical feedback, and three is that we love snacks, all of which are very true. but I think that set of three parameters overlaid with very, very deep operational excellence and really a team that is the coolest, most experienced team I've ever worked with.

Liz I don't know if that's our secrets, but that is our best approach. We have to breaking through mining, which [00:24:00] traditionally has seen very few, if any, unicorns. It's not B2B SaaS. The sales cycle are longer, the risks are a lot higher. But if we can crack this, we deliver more copper into the economy and that copper does things like improve grid electrification.

Liz And if you look at studies in developing countries like Bangladesh. Better grid stability means women live longer, children get to go to school. It is a very fundamental part of a just and fair energy transition.

Erum Wow. Yeah. That's a really incredible, and I love how you, have this culture where it's very professional but also very fun.

Erum I think that's really important because this is what you do every day.

Liz We try, as you can see, it's the goat wearing the party hat behind me, and we have. Bats up that were once a Halloween decoration. You can kind of see some here and now we just put different hats on them. So here is a Christmas hat on a bat.

Liz There are a lot of things in startup world you cannot control. In fact, the vast majority of things, especially in industrial biotechnology systems, you cannot control. but you can control your [00:25:00] attitude when you show up. I feel very Ted lasso right now. Like you can control the culture you build and your attitude, you show up and how you see these challenges.

Liz Are we going to invent our way through challenges and are we gonna do something that we know is probably impossible? Yeah, we're gonna do that. Being in Denver, we always talk about how we love type two fun. That's things that aren't fun when you're doing them, but are fun afterwards. Like, maybe not snowboarding, but like climbing a 14 or going rock climbing, running a marathon, all of those pieces.

Liz and that's one thing we can control is our mindset.

Erum Yeah, no, I love that. And I, I'm a big fan of yours. I've seen your, posts on LinkedIn and you guys share a lot of your culture and it's so, vibrant and fun. I'm like, oh, this is a great company to work for.

Liz I hope so. But I also appreciate when people pull me aside and they're like, Hey Liz, here's what you can do to improve.

Liz Because I think it's really easy as a CEO to be pulled into echo chambers where people tell you what you wanna hear. And that's not where you learn. You learn when you're uncomfortable.

Erum Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. [00:26:00] So let's talk a little bit more about some of your validation work and where you're now.

Erum And you mentioned you had a. 1.7. 1.9 recovery lift, which is really cool. can you walk us through what actually happens in operational systems and what it took to get mining operations to trust a biological system in the first place?

Liz a lot of it is trust but verify. So we have two labs in Denver.

Liz We are able to run industry standard experiments going from shake flasks to small columns to large columns. We collect a massive amount of data on those, and in that time, we've been able to test this out on multiple customer orders because it doesn't mean anything if you go to customer A and say, oh, this worked really well on customer C because the geology is so variable, the operational parameters are so variable.

Liz We have to earn the right to move forward with customers and earn their trust every single time. and that is something we've been doing through just really trying to talk less and listen more about the ultimate challenges. [00:27:00] In lab, we have a pretty streamlined process where if anyone wants to send us or we'll go through the lab, processes, we'll try it against the microbial communities we have, we'll give them real world data.

Liz we just hired a head of platform who has incredible background and is really building the next generation platform that ties all these things together, but it really is about. Under promising and over-delivering at the end of the day, if I had to sum it up.

Karl Yeah. What's amazing, Liz is like you've talked about your own career and you know, you said you'd worked on microbial genomics, open source data platforms, and then now industrial scale deployment, but how does working across data biology and infrastructure shape how you think about resource challenges?

Liz At a very cellular and fundamental level. For instance, I cannot put a query into chat GPT without thinking about the copper that is needed at the data center to produce that. And if we are going to continue to grow the capability of these LLMs, we need so much more copper because [00:28:00] it is the foundational element.

Liz Every time electrons move, well, the vast majority of times electrons move. They're done. So on copper backbones. And it really, it takes away any of the ignorance of the black box and the magic for how things are done. It also means that when I think about the core capabilities we need as a company, I don't worry about building the coolest LLM or the coolest AI capabilities.

Liz I worry about first principled data architecture. How are we getting our data into the cloud? How are we having necessary durability? How are we able to put data models on top of that so that the data can talk to one another? That's a challenge that. All industrial data systems have seen is, yeah, we have this data, but we don't know if it's good.

Liz We don't know what to do with it. And a lot of times companies spend energy and time on that final mile of deliverables that are the cool AI dashboards when we've been spending all of it on making sure we have the foundation. Right.

Erum that's great. I mean, and, and earlier you talked about how copper sits at the heart of electrification and the [00:29:00] energy transition.

Erum How do you think about the tension between scaling renewable technologies and the material extraction required to build them

Liz so, so, so deeply? The reality is we need more copper between now and 2050 than in the history of human civilization. Even if we could recycle all of the copper we have ever used, we still need more copper.

Liz That is kind of a hard pill to swallow because I'm from a generation in schooling where it's very cradle to cradle. How can we reduce, reuse, recycle? I remember the schoolhouse rocks from when I was a kid, and the reality is just like right now, we are dependent on hydrocarbons. We are very, very dependent on critical materials and critical metals.

Liz For that, I see two ways of thinking about it. One is, you know what? I'm just gonna, it'll come. We have great systems throughout the planet. Things will work out. Wherever is cheapest, it'll be produced. but I think we can do better than that. [00:30:00] As an American who has a much larger than globally average consumption of critical minerals and critical metals.

Liz I have a burden to make sure that I am trying to do things in the most responsible way possible. And this is a lot of value judgment from my side. But I, I get a new cell phone every two years. I try not to, but then mine gets slow and, you know, technology doesn't always work. I also, Amazon Prime things like new charging cables, and I don't, I am guilty of falling for how can I get things done faster.

Liz And so I just have to accept that my copper and critical mineral footprint is going to be. Probably in order of magnitude larger than someone in a developing world. Okay, cool. We can accept that without judgment. What do we do to offset that? And for me, it's about. Taking the minds we have here. I'm a big fan of American Mineral production for the pure reason that we have the most safety guardrails and we have the most [00:31:00] oversight and the best anti-slavery and anti coercion policies of most of the countries out there.

Liz So I'm a big fan of working within that system saying, let's go to Arizona, let's go to Utah. We've already dug these mines. It is also a price you have to pay. growing up in Alaska, you sometimes saw mountains that were excavated to get the coal out of them. You can infer a value judgment from that if you want, but at the end of the day, you are using that coal.

Liz You need to be willing to pay the price for your easy lifestyle. so taking that a step further, what can we do with the resources that we've already done, the mines we're already extracting, and how can we just squeeze every single last drop out of that? It is a responsibility and an opportunity and it is something that we as a company take incredibly, incredibly seriously.

Karl and you guys started out with copper, but you're expanding into other minerals like zinc, nickel, and cobalt. What determines whether biological recovery works for a given metal [00:32:00] and how do you think about. This critical minerals challenge that we face. You said we have to extract more between now and 2050. What do things look like after that?

Liz I do not have enough solid information and there are too many unknowable unknowns to know what things look like beyond 2050. I will say before this I was a VP of data architecture and data engineering at Wood Mackenzie and Wood Mac has the best critical minerals reports.

Liz It's where I really learned what a crisis we were dealing with. And we actually started out as a company with a more diversified platform. We were working on lithium, we were working on nickel, we were working on iron, we were working on copper. And then through getting DC funding through, looking at where the market has evolved over the past three years and where we can have the biggest impact, we've decided to really double down on copper.

Liz Biology works when a redox reaction is occurring. So anytime you need to move an electron from one thing to another, biology tends to be an incredible catalyst. It has a lot of the same advantages chemistry has, but it's more adaptable. Plus, we love working with microbes. They're just, they're so fundamentally [00:33:00] cool and they have so many more capabilities.

Erum Yeah. Let's talk about microbes a bit more. I mean, partnering with microbes and mining, means that you've we're working with these organisms that have evolved over geological time, and how do you navigate that balance between engineering control and biological activity?

Liz Yeah. We are not using genetically modified organisms, which is something that we've thought a lot about.

Liz We've discussed a lot because that is typically seen as somewhat. Data mock of how you can break through some of these constraints. The example I like to use is I have. Two dogs. They're both versions of Labradoodles. They are very fluffy. They are very fragile dogs. They are my GMO dogs. You know, if we had a zombie apocalypse, they would go out there to the zombie, they'd run over, they would get tummy rubs and they would be the first dogs out.

Liz whereas growing up in Alaska, we had these really sturdy brown mutts that we got from the pound and one of my childhood dogs like would go out and play with moose and be fine. They are so sturdy they [00:34:00] can live on like. Lake water and the hopes and dreams of the Alaskan wilderness. They're not these domesticated GMO bugs.

Liz And that's kind of how I think about microbial communities. When you over select for too many features, you get the very fluffy labradoodles that need you to call a mobile groomer every six weeks because they don't shed, whereas in reality, remain conditions are tough. And so we need the tough brown dogs.

Liz That can thrive in any conditions.

Karl Yeah, I mean, what's great about that is like we've had a number of people come on the podcast to talk about, wild type organisms, the use of non-model organisms. There's a bug for that. There's a microbe or a fungi that can solve that particular problem. And you mentioned, that you guys are going in these heaps already exist. They're basically legacy. Un monetized assets. And, how do you see that kind of optimization? Is that a new philosophy of resource stewardship, or what is that?

Liz I think the philosophies of resource stewardship are primarily driven by [00:35:00] economics.

Liz It's the end of the day, good intentions are always going to come secondary to economics and public policy decisions. So these types of ideas have been around for a long time. Having them work at scale repeatedly is something that's relatively new. Happy tech startups are brutal. there are many messy middles.

Liz There's many valleys of death. There's going from n equals one, which is great. You know, when you have one data point or two data points, your R squared is 1.000, and then you have to triangulate out from there. So we are working at a time in the year 2026 where there's a very sharp culmination of both the industrial biotechnology, also the policy pieces and the incentivization plus the economics are shifting.

Liz And those three circles coming together form of Venn diagram that I'm really optimistic is gonna drive meaningful change and a lot of innovation.

Erum Yes, yes. I love that. And the, in the world of copper, Bio leaching has been around, would you say that's what you're doing or what's the difference between what you're [00:36:00] doing and BioE?

Liz We are doing bio leaching evolved, pardon the pun there, but it's not just about taking one microbe and putting it in once. It is about continuously tweaking and monitoring and really using the full power of all of our data. And I will readily admit and be so grateful that we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Liz Even Christie talks about some of the early stuff that she learned about in bio leaching in school. Same with Andrew. This is not a net new field, but getting it to repeat. Make a difference. So we're approaching mining customers with, Hey, we'll get you more copper. Not, Hey, do you wanna know what bugs you have in the subsurface?

Liz Do you wanna know what your population of acid bacillus is? Because if you have a PhD in geo microbiology, that's very cool. But if your goal at the end of the day is to get more copper out of your asset, you don't really care about how much acidophil oxidants you have, you care about getting more copper out.

Karl And just for our, our listeners who don't know what bio leaching is, could you just give us a quick definition?

Liz Yeah, so chemical leaching uses sulfuric acid, bio leaching [00:37:00] uses microbes frequently, along with things like sulfuric acid so that we can get faster kinetics and, faster ultimate recovery. So again, these little microbial minions I like to imagine little hard hats and PPE are going, to work.

Erum Oh, I love that. Okay. So the big difference is, you know, the evolution, the microbial communities, and I'm, really trying to understand because, I had gone to this, you know, investor dinner. a company called Gunison Copper was, you know, fundraising. and they recently, 14,000 tons of copper using.

Erum Actually Rio Tintos spin out Newton. They created their own bio leaching, product and process. I'd love for you to talk about what that kind of signifies for you and how could you collaborate with them? and also like how do you fit yourself into this industry too?

Liz we actually already are, we've been working with Rio Tinto for a long time. It's publicly known With Rio Tinto Dune. So they're a wholly owned subsidiary and they're doing a lot of the same cool things that we are, but they're divergent in many key [00:38:00] ways. They're operating on assets that they already have.

Liz all of the team members I work with there have just been absolutely incredible. We've had many site visits, we've had really good knowledge sharing, and we were part of a founder's factory Rio Tinto cohort. To me, the coolest thing about the Rio Tinto Newton relationship is Rio Tinto recently signed an offtake with a WSI used to work at AWS saying that they would buy the copper that Newton was producing, the more environmentally friendly bio leach copper.

Liz So it's taking it out of these esoteric ideas where things could work, and actually putting pen to paper and creating proper incentivization. And I love that it's hard enough to be a startup where people are like, oh, we've never heard industrial bio leaching. Is this real? And then to have additional people in the world converging on the same thesis is incredibly powerful.

Liz A rising tide lifts all ships. We need so much copper that there's room for so many of us in the space. We have a lot of what people typically call competitors, but other early stage startups trying to do [00:39:00] the same thing. Really appreciate all of 'em. We all have slightly different thesis. We're testing, we collaborate, we share names.

Liz It is not a zero sum game. And also I don't think that's the mentality that we need to really foster the energy transition is one wins and everyone else loses. That's what's gotten us into a lot of problems before.

Erum And I kind of follow up question because one of the things that, Gunnison did, they went to this, copper mine that was a copper ore mine, and that ore was all taken out.

Erum So there was. Gets the, the heaps and this like, empty space. They needed to be able to then use their technology to recover more copper. And so they did that, recover 14,000 tons. Could you work with them to recover even more copper or

Liz We absolutely can. And a key difference between us and some of the operators like Newton is When I think about what success looks like, it is getting more copper out that gets plated out. It is not building and running and operating the mine and becoming a GM of a mine. I wanna be the force [00:40:00] multiplier that helps that happen across assets all over the US and all over the world.

Erum you use Carl's favorite word or term.

Erum He loves that term force multiplier. Ding, ding, ding, ding. You said the word.

Liz Many people on the team I'm sure would be very happy to work on one mine site, but I've, I've spent a lot of time on these very industrial big mine sites and I, you can really size people up that are miners and you see it and they've got it and that's the place in life.

Liz They are the happiest. And I've spent too much time in the cloud where I wanna be in front of a screen doing this kind of work, not the actual. Digging. my nails by the way are the copper oxidation series. I dunno if you can see this.

Erum Wow.

Liz We have like the most pure cathode, and then we have, different oxidized and reduced coppers, and we have different, types of mineralogy at the end, like the energetic antenna tight.

Liz So yeah, that's, that's what this advice. Can we, are you making a

Erum product? Is this, is

Liz this a product launch? Oh my god, you should have heard. When I went to my nail tech and she's like, okay, what's the vision for this? I'm like, [00:41:00] oh, industrial scale bio leaching. And she's like, I don't know what that means.

Liz And I was like, lemme tell you about it. And she's like, really? You do not have to. It'll be okay.

Karl I love this vision, Liz of, you know, someone, does a physical mining. There's all these abandoned mines, like a Newton can go in and then you guys can go in and you can continue to optimize using biology.

Karl And I just think that there's so much opportunity, and as you said, we have all these mines that already exist in North America that have all the resources that we probably need. So I think it's an amazing space that you guys are working in. But thinking ahead in terms of, 10 years, what happens when biology becomes a standard layer for mining operations around the world?

Karl What's different technically, culturally, regulatorily?

Liz There are going to be just more broadly on a macro level, there's going to be a lot of what I suspect are regulatory changes that will be happening in the next 10 years as different countries really suss out with [00:42:00] their road to mineral independence looks like it's a conversation that we are seeing start here in the US and it's been evolving so quickly.

Liz So I just wanna recognize that there are definitely some unknowable unknowns that factor into that. To me in 10 years, success means that biology is just a part of these normal mineral recovery systems. Mining companies are already pushing towards using sensors and automation and digital monitoring to guide things, and biological monitoring can be another layer in that stack.

Liz I see. Endo Lth is really being the connective tissue that brings it all together. I think our capability around our cloud native platform pieces is truly unique because it's based in having a, a more. Data agnostic system where we can bring in the genomics, we can bring in all the existing data, but really if and when microbes help operators recover significantly more metal from existing resources that expands supply without waiting for new mines to be built.

Liz Which means we can save things like the resources on the seabed or the resources on asteroids for future [00:43:00] generations if they need them, or we can keep them as a strategic asset.

Karl Well said. I love that.

Erum Yeah. I love the, the vision of the future. That's one of the favorite things. so we are at the point of the interview where we have our quick fire questions.

Erum Are you ready?

Liz I'm ready. Let's go.

Erum Okay. Alaska Wilderness or industrial Mine site.

Liz Oh, can I take both? The wilderness is where you get the systems thinking, but the mine site is where it actually gets applied. So it's the yin and the yang.

Karl You do get to choose both.

Liz Wonderful. Yeah.

Karl Okay. Copper or lithium, which one defines this decade?

Liz Copper? A thousand percent. Lithium might be getting a lot of the headlines now, but copper is the backbone of electrification.

Erum So if your microbes had a PR team, what would their slogan be?

Liz We've been doing this for billions of years and you humans are just catching up.

Karl And what's one myth about mining that you'd love to retire?

Liz That it is static. That's a set it and forget it process. The best operators out there are consistently [00:44:00] operating and optimizing in these very complex systems. And biology is just an another lever or another knob they can adjust.

Erum Wonderful. Okay, Final question. If Endo Lip had its soundtrack, what genre would it be?

Liz I actually made a playlist for a Series A that I put on LinkedIn. It's called Unwavering. I can share it with you. It is so good. It is a lot of probably industrial, electronic. It's a lot of structured systems like Crystal Castles and there's a lot of Grimes on there where there's something structured, but there's a full element of chaos in there as well.

Karl I love that. I'm a huge industrial music fan.

Erum Yeah, I love Crystal Castles. That's great.

Liz Yes. Yeah. Okay. I will, I'll send this playlist. It's also on my LinkedIn. It is probably, I,made it when I was getting ready for Series A and was like, okay, fundraising is the toughest thing ever. How do I make something to really pull together all the energy I want?

Liz Um, and it evolved and then I, Share a lot of random thoughts on LinkedIn, some of which should maybe be inside thoughts, but I like to put 'em out there because how you do one thing [00:45:00] is how you do everything.

Erum Put it out there. Continue. I love it. I'm one of your audience members. I just love it. It's refreshing.

Erum It's so authentic and original. there's a lot of AI generated stuff a lot of noise, but I love your stuff, so please continue.

Liz I appreciate that. I put this playlist out there probably six months ago and I got a text message from someone who's in the middle of their fundraising and she was like, I've listened to this so much.

Liz These songs actually help. And like, I think it brought tears to my eyes and I was like, we're not alone in this. We're all part of the same global system.

Karl That's so great. Well, Liz, thank you so much for coming on the Grow Everything podcast. This is such a great conversation. Yay. Thank you. Yay. We, we wanna have you come back in like a few months or a year so we can hear about your amazing progress.

Liz This was fun. Or I'll be like, Hey, it turns out I knew nothing back then. You knew nothing. Liz, Dennett, which is awesome. Like the best feedback you can get is that you were wrong. You made original mistakes. You learned and grew and [00:46:00] evolved in the process. I love that.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. And continue to talk to our audience about it.

Erum 'cause we all need to learn how we can grow everything. So there we go.

Liz Amazing. Thank you so much for the great conversation.

Karl Thank you.

Erum Yes, absolutely. See ya.

Karl What did you think of this interview with Liz?

Erum wow, I just am so blown away because I came into this conversation thinking, okay, she's using a microbe that they engineered to, [00:47:00] Focus on copper recovery, and that is not it. She's using, native extremophile microbial consortia, which I'm like, holy smokes, right?

Erum I'm like, this is really cool. And her perspective, you can feel her energy. She's very, very, intelligent and brings interesting like conversations. I love Her perspective on work culture. I mean, I just was like, oh, I would love to work there. We were like, I love working with you, Carl.

Erum We have a great work culture, but she just seems very, vibrant and fun to be around. but besides that, like the work that they're doing. It's just, okay, this is the start. What I'm, I'm kind of sad about is we didn't really talk about, mining, you know, minerals in space as much as I would like to.

Erum I think we might have mentioned one or two things, especially given her background and astrobiology, but Liz, if you're listening to this, we've gotta have you back on and talk more about what we could do in that space.

Karl what I love about Endo Lith is, I [00:48:00] feel like I've been tracking the biology slash mining space or the use of microbes for, improving yields when it comes to mining and also the extraction of rare earth metals. And what I see with Liz and Endo is these guys are out there doing it. They already are demonstrating that they can get more copper out of mines. And, She even says that getting 10% more copper is monumental because a minority exists. And so if you're able to go in there and extract more minerals from an existing site, it means you don't have to dig another hole in the ground.

Erum Yeah. And this is very important for the energy transition. there's a, a stat that says we need more copper between now and 2050 than in all of prior human history. so we need to be making a lot more things. but, all the perfect recycling, it's not enough. New production is unavoidable.

Erum And, the big underscore, the big elephant in a room is that we need this copper for data centers. because every time an electron moves, you're using [00:49:00] copper.

Karl thing that was really exciting is like, here I am talking about what does this recovery transition look like? And I was really excited by what Liz said about the 10 year vision for what she sees when it comes to biology as really a standard operating knob when it comes to mining another, tool that they add to their tool belt, you know, n to chemistry, geology. Fluid dynamics, all of these things together. And she even said endo lith can become like a connective tissue tying biology, sensors, cloud data together across many sites. I find that to be very exciting. Liz, we wanna have you come back on the Grow Everything Podcast. We can talk about this even more in a few months.

Erum Yep, yep. And talking about all the collaborations they do.

Erum It's interesting that she used to work at AWS and now is working with AWS as a partner to do off takes as a proof that this is real bankable copper. So that's very exciting and I think, you know, with us in our interest in bringing people together and collaborating, it's just a [00:50:00] great thing to see how Endo lith and the companies we have here on the podcast start working with other industry players to grow everything.

Karl Absolutely. Well, I think let's wrap it up. Meet us and everyone who is growing everything this year at Symbio Beta in San Jose. In May, you can use promo code, grow everything for a discount. Thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. Find us on all streaming channels. People text us questions and we do answer.

Karl We love hearing from you, our listeners. You can find all our information in the show notes. Subscribe to our substack. Make sure you watch us on YouTube, like and subscribe and comment. We take the comments very seriously. We're also on TikTok, where we're seeing a lot of traction. So that's the pod.