The Cloudminer – Mining Big Data
Jim Guzy (MSc 2011)
Daniel Bloor (MSc 2011)
One American, one Briton, one Australian, and three beers.
“That was pretty much how it started,” said Jim Guzy, CEO of the data analysis startup The Cloudminer.
“We are three founders.”
Guzy is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had the experience of listing companies on the NASDAQ. He and British geologist Daniel Bloor crossed paths in Hong Kong in 2011 whilst studying the same Master’s programme in Applied Geosciences at HKU.
The synergy brought the pair and Australian mining engineer Will Coverdale together to found The Cloudminer, which provides realtime information on mineral asset valuation, analysis and financing.
“I rely a lot on Dan’s mining knowledge,” said Guzy. “But coming from Silicon Valley, I saw that there is very little IT in mining and resource’s sector.”
Before The Cloudminer’s launch in September 2014, geologists, commodity traders, bankers and mining companies had no choice but to valuate digging projects using old enterprise systems. This could mean building models in Excel and spending long hours inputting numbers into multiple spreadsheets.
“The old way of doing things was that you had to download and store software on servers that were customised, which was expensive and cumbersome,” said Guzy.
“But now, this is all available on the Web. We want to save people from mundane work.”
The Cloudminer can process, analyse and present massive amounts of data in clean tables and charts on iCloud. It builds a database on the Internet and usergenerated content.
“We take technical data held in PDFs of some 360,000 miningprojects globally, downloading them, extracting all the publicly
available data,” said Bloor. “We cover about 80% of all mining projects around the world.
Investors, analysts and executors of mining projects are The Cloudminer’s major customers.
“When considering the start of a new mining project, it’s very important to benchmark and compare the costs and methodologies among all theprojects with similar geology and geography, or similar mining and processing methods,” said Bloor. “In this case, users can get a handle of what different operation and capital costs might be.”
After six weeks, the enterprise has already sealed subscription deals with 160 clients, including big banks.
“Hong Kong is Asia’s financial hub,” said Guzy. “Our potential clients gather here. It’s the perfect location.”
But there are also customers who are skeptical about storing data on cloud-based services.
“Some clients are more wary and worry about data security, but we counter that by describing how our data and security systems are like online banking,” said Bloor. “It can feel like we sometimes have to reeducate customers with our market
approach to adopt new ideas.”
The trio expects to expand its service to other commodities like oil and gas.