The world's largest mining conference in Canada
NextOre joined the world’s largest mining conference in Toronto, Canada, to advance its bulk ore sorting conversations with operators, developers, and investors from across the global minerals sector — and returned with a sharper sense of just how large the opportunity is.
The Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) is the pre-eminent annual gathering of the global mining industry. More than 25,000 attendees from over 130 countries converge on Toronto each year to do business, forge partnerships, and take the temperature of the sector. For NextOre, it is one of the most important events on the calendar — and PDAC 2026 did not disappoint.
NextOre attended alongside company chair Rob Adamson of RFC Ambrian and CEO Chris Beal, with engagements spanning copper, gold, and base metal operators across Canada, Africa, the United States, Finland, and Australia. The consistent theme across those conversations: the mining industry is under mounting pressure to do more with less — to extract more metal, use less energy and water, generate less waste, and demonstrate genuine environmental performance. These are exactly the conditions that make NextOre’s MR bulk ore sorting technology a compelling proposition.
The Scale of the Opportunity
PDAC is a useful reminder of the sheer scale of global mining activity — and, by extension, the scale of the inefficiency that bulk ore sorting technology can address. Operations processing tens of millions of tonnes per year, running on tight margins, facing declining ore grades and increasing regulatory scrutiny: these are the customers NextOre is built for. The breadth of interest at PDAC — across geographies, commodity types, and operational scales — confirmed that the market for real-time, accurate, non-destructive grade measurement extends well beyond NextOre’s existing installed base.
The parallel with NextOre’s sister company MRead in the humanitarian demining sector is instructive: in both cases, the underlying magnetic resonance technology is addressing a problem that existing approaches cannot solve adequately. In mining, that problem is the inability to make accurate, real-time ore grade decisions at the throughput rates that large operations demand. The opportunity to improve both the economics and the environmental footprint of mining — simultaneously — is not a niche proposition. It is a mainstream one.
Peers at the Cutting Edge
PDAC also provided an opportunity to reconnect with Dirk Treasure and Andrea McLaren from Chrysos Corporation — a fellow CSIRO-derived technology company commercialising photon assay technology for the global mining industry under the leadership of Dr Nick Cutmore FTSE and David Miljak. Chrysos represents a compelling example of what Australian deep tech commercialisation can achieve at global scale, and the shared experience of bringing CSIRO-developed technology to market across multiple continents makes for genuinely valuable peer exchange.
A Market Built on Purpose
What stands out at an event like PDAC — beyond the scale of capital involved and the geographic reach of the industry — is the quality of the people driving it. Operators, developers, and investors who are genuinely focused on solving hard problems: productivity, environmental impact, community outcomes, long-term resource stewardship. These are not peripheral concerns to the mining industry’s future. They are central to it.
NextOre’s MR bulk ore sorting technology sits directly at the intersection of those priorities — improving metal recovery, reducing the volume of waste processed, lowering energy and water consumption per tonne of metal produced, and giving operators the real-time grade intelligence they need to run smarter operations. The reception at PDAC confirmed that message is landing.
What Comes Next
The relationships and conversations initiated at PDAC will be developed through site visits, technical evaluations, and commercial discussions over the months ahead. NextOre’s pipeline in North America and Africa in particular has been meaningfully advanced by this year’s attendance.
For a technology at NextOre’s stage of commercial development, events like PDAC are not just networking opportunities — they are market development in its most direct form. Toronto delivered.
For enquiries about NextOre’s bulk ore sorting solutions, contact us at info@nextore.com.au