How geoscience software flipped the mining industry on its head

An interview with Graham Grant, CEO of Seequent

Seequent is on a mission to empower innovation in the mining industry. The geoscience software company recently announced that enables integrated workflows, as well as two native applications, Driver and BlockSync. Graham Grant (GG), CEO of Seequent, describes these new technologies as “game changing,” and they are just the latest entries in a line-up of innovative products from the company. Grant is passionate about the advances that Seequent — and its flagship geological modelling software, Leapfrog — has introduced across the geosciences.

At PDAC 2025, we had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Grant to discuss how the mining industry can benefit from Seequent’s innovation philosophy.

CMJ: Can you tell us about the history of Seequent and how it became what it is today?

GG: The important history of Seequent started before Seequent. It began in Hyde Park, London, with a mathematician and an engineer who were trying to solve the problem of severe head injuries: if someone has a car accident or motorcycle accident and breaks their skull, how can the skull be rebuilt? They applied a special class of mathematics to describe the surface area of the head, so that they could build a titanium implant and surgically implant in into the head. That was around 2000 or 2001. They did some cool stuff with the software they developed: the computer-generated imagery (CGI). The “Men in Black” and “The Lord of the Rings” movies used that software, and NASA used the software to model asteroids. Then, the developers were approached by a mining organization that wanted to try their mathematics in the context of geology. And it worked. It was a very unusual approach. Old-school geologists used to hand-draw maps, and a lot of the software at the time just digitized that way of working, whereas our software dealt with algorithms and mathematics. It was transformational. That was the genesis of Leapfrog, which is the product we have today. It was launched out of that medical business in 2003, which predated Seequent, but they were ostracized by the geoscience industry, who said they knew nothing about geology. It took 10 years for market acceptance of that approach to geology.

I joined Seequent in 2012. At that time, we were 5% of the size we are today. We were one office in New Zealand, above a café, with 30 people and $2 to $3 million in revenue. We literally threw the product away. We knew it would never scale. So, we built a new one, which is known today as “Leapfrog Geo.” We released it in 2013, and it took off because of the market crash in 2014, when the price of iron ore fell 80% and gold fell 45%. Mining companies respond to a downturn by reducing costs, being more efficient, working harder, and working faster. Leapfrog was unbelievably fast, so the mining companies climbed onboard. Over the next 10 years, we grew 10 times our scale.

We knew that Leapfrog covered geology, but we are in a whole value chain of data, exploration, geostatistics, block modelling, and mine operations. So, we have acquired 10 software companies to fill out the geosciences. Now, Seequent has the broadest range of geoscience software of any company in the world. We work in mining, energy, oil and gas, geothermal, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage (CCS), civil infrastructure, and water. We even work in unexploded ordinances. If you are going to drop a new gas pipeline or fibre optic cable through the North Sea, and you want to know if there is a bomb there from World War II, you would use our software.

CMJ: What was your background before joining Seequent?

GG: I worked in forestry; I trained in growing trees. I ended up managing the Southern Hemisphere’s largest private forestry company, in terms of the forest estate. I was very involved in shipping products from New Zealand to Asia. Then, I moved into personal and business banking. And then, renewable energy: I spent time building wind turbines and solar parks in the U.K. I have been across many, many industries, and I stumbled into geoscience software by mistake in 2012. I came for three months and never left.

CMJ: How does your experience in so many different industries influence your work at Seequent?

GG: One thing I have learned is that business is business. It does not matter if you run a mining company or a bank. They are all complex in their own way, but industries run with blinkers on. They just look at what they know. They do not look outside. Some mining executives say we need to look outside our industry, for example, to oil and gas. I would say you have to look way further than oil and gas. Look everywhere. No one would have thought of looking into cranial implants for the next revolution in mining. But Leapfrog has literally flipped the industry on its head, and it is now the standard method of modelling geology anywhere in the world. One of the problems of innovation is you are staring at your own shoes. You are not listening to new outside ideas. I think Seequent is the broadest of any technology company here at PDAC, in terms of the range of technologies we have, and we are the only one here that came from outside mining.

CMJ: In your opinion, are there any other reasons why we do not see more innovation in the software and technology area of the mining industry?

GG: I can give you three reasons why I think there is a problem in innovation in our piece of the industry. I cannot speak for engineering or processing. The first reason is that the resident, traditional software players came from inside the industry. They know what they know. They might digitize an old process, so you are doing the same thing slightly differently, but everyone is talking to each other in the same language again and again.

The second reason is the big consolidation move going on right now. This is happening because all the companies are founder-owned. Founders must sell their technology at some point, and bigger companies are the buyers. This laddering-up of technologies can be either good or bad, depending on the motivation of the buying company. If you are a consolidator that just buys up little software companies and keeps running them, I would describe that as a rental house strategy: buy a few houses, do a bit of a paint job, rent them out, collect your money. But nothing is going to change. Some of the consolidation is more about locking up the technology than doing anything interesting with it. And that is great for the shareholders of the software company, but it is not great for the customer. It throws a wet blanket right over the top of anything innovative. Those companies think “do not change anything” is the best strategy.

And the third reason — which no one talks about — is that upstream, in this geoscience area, it is a small market. If you add up the revenue streams across all the technologies, it is small, in global terms. So, why would this even be interesting to an outside player?

Those three reasons, I think, are very profound. In all the years I have been coming to PDAC, I walk around, and I do not see companies changing. I see the same booths with slightly more polish, but everyone keeps doing the same thing. Seequent is just not prepared to do that. It is not in our DNA. Everyone thinks of us as Leapfrog, but if you go back through the last 10 years, we have dropped a whole series of extremely innovative products into the market that are unlike anything else. We quietly just get on with the job of innovating.

CMJ: Can you tell us a bit more about some of those innovative products? And what sparked the development of your newest product, Seequent Evo?

GG: Leapfrog Energy is the best subsurface energy product in the world, outside of oil and gas. Now, 60% of all the world’s geothermal power runs through our software. The world was jammed up with highly complicated geostatistics software, so we built Leapfrog Edge to deliberately democratize geostatistics and make it easy for geologists. Leapfrog Works is the category leader in civil infrastructure ground modelling worldwide. Now, we are announcing Evo, Driver, and BlockSync, all game-changing technologies.

The existing players in the industry built what we describe as a “walled garden” around their technology. Their data formats are proprietary. You cannot easily send data somewhere and get someone else to work with it, because it is locked up inside their technology. This is an old strategy playbook in software. Lots of big industry players try to envelop the customer and lock them in, and once they are in, they cannot leave. But mining is a process. No matter what these bits of software do, the information must flow through the whole mining process. So, we set out to fundamentally break that old mindset. The mining customers run the drilling rigs, they own the data, they paid for the software. What right do you have as a software company to lock it up? With Evo, we wanted to flip that entire thing on its head. We needed a new operating system where things can move in and out, in a way that is easy, sophisticated, cloud native, and puts control back in the hands of the customer.

CMJ: You recently partnered with the International Geothermal Association. Why is that partnership important for Seequent?

GG: We have been quiet leaders in geothermal for so long that we wanted to support the association’s global endeavours, but it also gives us a chance to reach for a voice that we would not otherwise reach. We recently acquired a new piece of reservoir simulation technology and put it together with Leapfrog Energy. It is transforming how geothermal companies run their operations. Countries today are worried about energy security; they do not want to be dependent on someone else. Geothermal is a domestic fuel source, so countries that are lucky enough to have geothermal are starting to invest heavily to build up their geothermal capability. That is why we want to reach these organizations and help them.

CMJ: What do you have in mind for future collaborations? Are there any pieces missing from the work you are currently doing?

GG: We are hopeful and confident that, as we launch our new products, we will see mining companies begin to take control of their own destiny and start building workflows and streamlining their operations. We need to get mining companies to come onboard and adopt that way of thinking: getting out of the lockbox and into building.

Secondly, let us facilitate the next round of innovators. One of the reasons young tech entrepreneurs do not come into this industry is that it is so hard to get in! You can see these entrepreneurs in their convention booths, doing their best to convince a mining company to buy their product. If we can provide a platform for them to jump onto and connect into — with open application programming interfaces (APIs), high performance, cloud compute: a massively secure system that runs at industrial strength and is replicated all around the world — then we can stimulate a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators. That is maybe a fourth reason we do not see innovation: it is so hard. Seequent had to fight for 10 years just to get started. We cannot do that anymore. We must encourage these young, creative, and destructive thinkers to come into mining instead of going somewhere else. So, I think the missing pieces will come with the arrival of the entrepreneurs and new, interesting startups. They do not need to be owned by us. We just want to facilitate them to arrive.

CMJ: Where do you see Seequent in the next five years?

GG: We are growing fast, so we will be a lot bigger than we are now. We will make vast strides in the civil infrastructure market. Like mining, it has its own challenges. When was the last time you can recall a large infrastructure project that was on budget and on time? One of the challenges is that everything that is built — like stadiums, freeways, and airports — is built in or on the underground. No one has ever connected the idea of subsurface uncertainty with designed, built infrastructure. Now that Seequent is part of Bentley Systems, leaders in the built infrastructure world, there is a chance for us to transform how our infrastructure is delivered. That is a massive market, and we are going to approach it the way we approach mining: sideways.

Within mining, there are vast opportunities to improve the way mining is done. Our ultimate goal on the mining side is to help companies build better businesses. There is so much going on for mining executives right now, in terms of geopolitics, trade, inflation, and social license to operate — it is a really long list — and most of those issues are uncertain and highly volatile. So, how do you navigate your mining company, which is a 50- to 100-year business, through that kind of interim volatility? Those are punishing requirements on mining executives. We believe that mining companies need to be adaptable and agile. The purpose of Evo being open and flexible is to deliver mining companies means by which they can be fundamentally flexible. Right now, with the lockbox, they cannot. Mining companies are being asked to be technology companies. Work is loaded on the mining company to connect all these Lego blocks together that do not join up. And they are all doing it individually. Think of the cost of that to the industry. It is a morally indefensible way of running technology, so we are going to turn this on its head and do it the opposite way around. Seequent is probably the first technology company attending PDAC that has ever given code away in an open-source format. It is the modern way to go. 

Kesiah Stoker is a multi-skilled freelance writer.