, with the remaining minority shareholding acquired after four years.IMDEX will initially acquire a 80.5% controlling equity interest for A$26 million ($17 million), with the remaining minority shareholding acquired after four years.){kind=link}
IMDEX Limited has announced plans to acquire Norway-based Earth Science Analytics AS (ESA) as part of the continued expansion of its digital orebody knowledge capabilities across multiple resources markets.
This transaction will enable IMDEX to coordinate capabilities from existing offerings such as Datarock, aiSIRIS and Mineportal into ESA’s EarthNET platform, facilitating the creation of an open platform for all earth systems and delivering enhanced AI-enabled geoscience solutions for customers, it says. It also strengthens IMDEX’s Pre-Drill Intelligence through seismic and multi-physics capabilities that complement IMDEX’s drilling and core farm technologies.
IMDEX will initially acquire a 80.5% controlling equity interest for A$26 million ($17 million), with the remaining minority shareholding acquired after four years. The transaction is expected to close by the end of August 2025.
Founded in 2016, ESA has developed EarthNET, a cloud-based, AI-driven geoscience platform. EarthNET enables ingestion and integration of vast datasets (pre-drilling geophysical surveys, drill hole sensor data, core farm image data, sensor data, and laboratory data) to enable the application of machine-learning models across such datasets in a cloud-agnostic environment. While ESA’s current offering primarily serves the energy sector, its platform is highly transferable across all earth science datasets and has a track record of transforming industrial data into real-life business value, IMDEX says, with productivity metrics such as:
- >90% reduction in interpretation time for geophysical data, changing cycle times from weeks to hours; and
- >95% accuracy in rock property prediction accuracy by using AI models trained on quality-controlled data.
ESA’s technology is, IMDEX says, at a crucial inflection point, having been through its development phase and now in early market adoption with oil and gas majors and national oil companies. Combining with IMDEX’s digital portfolio will support ESA growing its existing customer base in the energy sector as well as accelerate expansion of the EarthNET platform into the minerals and mining market.
Paul House, Managing Director and CEO of IMDEX, said: “This acquisition is a defining step in the acceleration of our digital strategy across multiple end markets. By integrating ESA’s talent and EarthNET platform with IMDEX’s existing capabilities, we’re significantly reducing time-to-market for our orebody knowledge solutions. EarthNET is a foundational technology – highly scalable,
cloud-native and AI-enabled – that complements our portfolio alongside Datarock and Krux. Combined, these platforms will materially expand our digital offering in the 2026 financial year and position it as a primary growth engine for our business.
“Collectively these acquisitions are about maximising the use of the data for our customers that we have collected via our HUB-IQ connected sensors that will ultimately facilitate a wide variety of data enrichment that benefits our customers.”