Munich-based deeptech mining company Hades Mining has emerged from stealth and announced today that it has raised a €5.5 million pre-seed round led by Project A.
Europe’s energy and critical mineral demand are surging – driven by AI, electrification, and industrial reshoring – while the continent imports over 58.4 per cent of its energy and over 90 per cent of its critical minerals, creating vulnerable dependencies. Europe’s clean-energy transition and industrial base depend on secure domestic access to critical minerals and reliable baseload heat.
Many resources occur at great depths of kilometres below our feet, or in geologically challenging settings that conventional methods cannot reach, and many existing deposits and geothermal reservoirs remain under-accessed due to technical limits.
Addressing this challenge, Munich-based Hades Mining was founded by serial deeptech entrepreneurs Dr. Max Werner (Founder & CEO, serial deep-tech entrepreneur with a military background), Björn Dressler (Founder & CTO, former COO at Isar Aerospace), and Dan Gengenbach (Founder & SVP Material Displacement, former VP at Marvel Fusion and applied physicist).
The company is building a new class of drilling and subsurface access systems to operate projects directly – expanding existing resources and pushing the frontier to ultra-deep extraction.
By accessing ultra-deep and stable heat reservoirs beneath the Earth’s crust, Hades unlocks geothermal energy at an unprecedented scale and advances in-situ recovery (ISR) – a low-impact technique using fluid circulation to extract minerals from deep rock formations without open-pit excavation.
Technical details remain confidential at this stage. Hades remains independent by developing and operating mining and geothermal projects from start to finish: securing licences, drilling, and managing production. Partners and subcontractors are brought in only where they add speed, safety, or scale.
Unlike traditional contractors who are paid per metre drilled, Hades generates revenue directly from the minerals, power, and heat it produces, maintaining long-term ownership stakes in every project. This vertically integrated, technology-driven model accelerates development, enhances efficiency, and transforms each site into a platform for multiple high-value outputs.
By owning the full process, Hades gains operational knowledge that feeds directly into technology development, making implementation faster and more effective. The company prioritises European projects that strengthen strategic supply chains for EVs, renewable energy, semiconductors, and district heating — directly supporting the continent’s energy transition and industrial resilience.
“Europe can’t lead the energy transition while depending on others for the building blocks of modern life,” said Dr Max Werner, founder and CEO of Hades Mining.
“We’re working hard to bring the entire process under one roof — from license to production — combining the speed and precision of a tech company with the responsibility and staying power of a resource owner.
Our goal is to help build a new standard for accessing minerals and energy at depth, and to do it in a way that’s transparent, sustainable, and future-focused.”
Led by Project A, other participants in the round include Visionaries Tomorrow, Founders Factory (Venture Fund funded by Rio Tinto) and strategic angels across aerospace, energy, and advanced manufacturing:
- Florian Seibel (Quantum Systems),
- Roman Hölzl (RobCo),
- Daniel Wiegand (formerly Lilium),
- Moritz von der Linden (Marvel Fusion),
- Hélène Huby (The Exploration Company),
- Chris O’Connor (formerly NIF),
- Dr Nicolas Burkardt (Marvel Fusion), and
- Viessmann Generations Group.
“Access to energy and critical minerals is essential for any nation to remain independent, secure, and productive — and to give itself the greatest chance of democratic stability,” said Jack Wang, Partner at Project A.
“Hades is working to ensure Europe can depend on these resources for the long term. It’s a decisive step towards the resilience our continent needs. Energy is the next sovereign frontier.”
Thong Le Hoang, Founding Partner at Visionaries Tomorrow, said:
“One of the toughest challenges in applied deep tech is operating in extreme environments under real-world time, cost, and quality constraints. In energy and minerals, that means economically accessing superdeep reservoirs — a problem unsolved despite decades of incremental improvements.
Hades is advancing the frontier with a breakthrough system built for unprecedented speed, scale, and precision.
By taking a systems-level approach to target the industry’s true bottlenecks, not just isolated lab results, the team turns deep tech into a strategic asset for Europe, unlocking one of the most consequential economic and impact opportunities of our time.”
Hades will deploy the funding towards the development of its new technologies and exploring the first sites for energy and critical mineral extraction.
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