Jimmy Mengel,
Director of Customer Experience
Oct. 23, 2026
I recently came across the most interesting job posting in the world: “Pirate Wanted to Discover Sunken Treasure”.
As a longtime pirate aficionado, the posting definitely caught my eye. While pirates have a less romantic look these days – submachine guns and skiffs have replaced swords and sloops – I couldn’t help but dig deeper into what this position entailed.
The requirements?
Lifetime nautical experience. Demonstrated ability to dive in conditions insurance companies decline to cover. Handling permits, port officials, customs, and the occasional moray eel?
Color me intrigued. Do go on…
Experience working with AI?
At this point I was a bit confused. Of all the things I associated with pirates, AI was not one of them. But considering that AI has touched basically every part of our world it shouldn’t have surprised me. AE Studio – the company that posted the help wanted ad – merges AI with sunken ship information in order to place a big ‘X’ on the treasure map to tell excavators exactly where to dive.
By mining around “eighty million pages of Spanish colonial bureaucracy, ship manifests, admiralty filings, and insurance records” with large scale AI language models, the company can pinpoint the locations of undiscovered shipwrecks and lost cargo.
Their AI model produces exact coordinates. It can read more logs, maps and records in an afternoon than a human can read in a lifetime.
There is an estimated $60 to $100 billion worth of unrecovered sunken treasure sitting at the bottom of the world's oceans right now.
By tapping into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s public database of shipwrecks along with sonar and lidar imagery collected from around the world, AE Studio’s goal is to help retrieve that booty.
Most underwater archaeology is dangerous and prohibitively expensive – but an AI model mapping all shipwrecks above the surface can reduce times, costs and risks.
Now, let’s apply that kind of technology to something we can invest in.
Mining.
The same type of AI technology being used to uncover sunken treasures has now been harnessed by the world of mining. And that could be a game changer for companies looking to extract gold, silver, copper and other rare earth metals from the grounds of the Earth.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates around 50,000 tonnes of gold reserves remain below ground globally – that’s about 20% of the 200,000 tonnes mined throughout all of human history.
Vast amounts of that gold are currently uneconomic to mine. But just like the shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea, the new wave of AI technology could make it possible to locate the most likely hiding spots for the rest of the precious metals hiding beneath the soil.
Thankfully a new company has begun what could be a massive breakthrough for the mining sector.
You see, the mining industry has accumulated decades of drill logs, assay certificates, geological reports, maps, geophysical surveys, handwritten records and historical interpretations.
Some of the most useful work in mineral exploration has already been completed and paid for by someone else. Drill core and assay records are sitting in archives, while government surveys contain results that were never connected from operator to operator.
The data is there. It already exists and is largely free. But what has never existed is the capacity to read all of it consistently. It is beyond challenging to find, organize and analyze all of it before a mining company begins any drilling program.
AI accelerates that process.
This private company’s platform uses specialized agents to work through enormous collections of historical data. That allows their experienced geologists to eliminate weak targets, identify missed opportunities and direct more of their time and exploration budgets toward the most promising opportunities.
In one early partnership with a copper company, the company’s AI agents found the same three core systems as a human geologist in just 3% of the time.
This new AI project generator company is already attracting the eyes of major financial institutions and some of the most respected technical people in the space. It won’t be long until they become a household name in the new AI mining partnership.
They already have a services business, a portfolio of mineral projects, and signed agreements that can generate royalties.
They are currently raising capital to expand upon those projects.
The current raise is priced at roughly a $24 million valuation. The next time they raise capital, it could be at 4 to 5 times this current raise.
You’d be getting in at the ground floor of a major shift in the way mining is done from here on out.
There is one catch: this opportunity is a private one.
But we are able to offer Private Placement Intel members a seat at the table on early-stage deals like this new AI mining company because of the network Nick Hodge and Gerardo Del Real have cultivated over the years.
If you are an accredited investor, please take advantage of this prime investment window while its open.
And before the ship has sailed…
Godspeed,
Jimmy Mengel
Director of Customer Experience, Bizarro World