Haydon Mort has made a name for himself helping geologists and those in the mining industry better communicate with stakeholders. Now, he’s hoping to help investors de-risk project investments with his new company, SureOre.ai.
Mort is the founder, director, and CEO of Geologize, a communication training program for geoscientists that leverages basic neuroscience principles to improve practical industry communication and teaching in academia.
“I launched Geologize five years ago, and fast forward to today, there are more than 65,000 users on the platform,” Mort said. The AAPG Foundation and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) have partnered with Geologize to provide American Geoscience Institute (AGI) member societies free access. That’s more than 250,000 geoscientists worldwide.
In November 2024, Mort added mining communication program to the Geologize platform, hoping to help that industry better gain social license to operate, drum up community engagement, communicate with investors, attract capital, and improve crisis and future communications efforts. “They were very open about having a big problem with social license to operate,” he said. “They couldn’t get projects off the ground because there was so much opposition.”
Mort realized the typical approach to community engagement in mining projects, focusing on potential economic impact – jobs added, hospitals and schools built, and tax dollars gained – wasn’t working.
“No one believes those numbers anymore, because there are so many broken promises,” he said. Additionally, the typical investor for a mining project, a high-risk speculative investor or venture capitalist, often doesn’t prioritize social license to operate.
But social license to operate can be the make-or-break factor in mining: It is six times more indicative of a project’s success than its geological promise, according to research from EY and Wood Mackenzie. Mort realized the industry needed to attract investors who cared deeply about a project’s effects on a community, such as impact investors, ESG-focused firms, or church pension funds.
“So, I found a way to quantify social licenses,” he explained.
SureOre.Ai was born.
The new platform uses AI to calculate a score for various investment risks, including geological promise, management and C-suite track record, how well-capitalized the company is, how sustainable operations are, and social license to operate. Essentially, it allows potential investors to easily assess risk and impact.
For social license to operate, the AI model scans news articles, social media platforms, and chatrooms to examine infrastructure at the project site, management track record, geopolitical tensions in the area, protests, lawsuits, etc. and how they could impact the project. Within about 90 seconds, an investor can see a numeric score with sources cited. They can do the same for geological promise and other due diligence areas. The scores for each factor follow a strict marking rubric. Then they are instantly fed into a probabilistic model (Bayesian distributions) based on thousands of historical data points to determine the likelihood of success of making a return on investment. “This is about investment success – the likelihood that you are going to make at least a five-times investment return on your investment,” Mort said.
Mort hopes SureOre.ai will attract diverse investors and incentivize current players to make ethical decisions. It will also potentially save investors millions in wasted capital directed at unsuccessful projects. “I’m just trying to push the sector to change,” Mort said. Eventually, he sees a wide range of applications for SureOre.ai, including oil and gas, insurance decisions, mining, finance, and more. “I want to tackle the oil and gas and mining industries first.”