Mariana Minerals partners with Pronto and deploys autonomous trucks at Utah copper site A former Tesla engineer is building an automated mining stack to move cleaner metal to market faster. Early trials will combine Pronto autonomous controls with Mariana’s MineOS. As noted by Techcrunch There’s a lot of focus in the U.S. right now on domestic manufacturing, but Turner Caldwell, who spent nearly ten years at Tesla, argues that too little attention is paid to the minerals and metals lying at the bottom of the supply chain. So he left the company and founded Mariana Minerals in 2024 with a clear aim: to supply the market with purer metal while developing a modern mining and processing operation focused on growth. The core concept of the company is automation of almost every stage of the mining process to increase productivity and reduce costs. According to Caldwell, this is necessary to get metal into the ecosystem faster and in greater quantities. The latest step in this direction is a partnership with Pronto, a startup that has developed autonomous control systems for dump trucks and other equipment at mines and construction sites. This is Pronto’s first deal since acquiring Atoms – the new robotics division led by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanik. The partnership also signals a return to collaboration with Antoni Levendowski, a former engineer on Google’s famous autonomous driving project and a founder of Pronto. According to plan, autonomous trucks will soon begin operating at Copper One – the former copper production plant in Utah that Mariana acquired last year. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. But the main thing is the integration of Pronto’s autonomous control system directly with MineOS, the software Mariana developed to manage mine operations. This will allow automatic task allocation and route coordination without human