Mika Kortelainen
Mika Kortelainen is Co-Founder and CEO of Mineralytics. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics and brings a broad background spanning technology, analytics, leadership and business. He came to the mining industry from the outside, and hasn’t looked back.
Mineralytics prices quantitative mineralogy by sample count. A project of 50 samples costs 5,000 €, which is 100 € per sample. A project of 250 samples costs 10,000 €, which is 40 € per sample. Above 250 samples the price per sample keeps falling, and those projects are quoted per project. Prices exclude VAT.
Sets below 50 samples are priced case by case, and competitively. A pilot is priced as a pilot. When a beamtime we have booked has room left, a small batch can be measured in it at a fraction of the 50-sample price. So the cost-effective end of synchrotron XRD is not only the large campaign. Small sets cost what their setup costs, and setup can be shared.
Every sample at these prices includes the whole pipeline: preparation from the customer’s pulps, the measurement at a particle accelerator (a synchrotron) with our beamline partners, Rietveld quantification of every phase with confidence intervals and the evidence behind each phase, chemistry back-calculated from the mineralogy as a check against assays, and a review of the results together with the customer’s geologists. The deliverable is the data, per sample and per project. Amorphous content and grinding are priced separately. These prices are competitive with laboratory quantitative XRD and with other synchrotron services, and they are for the analysis, not the measurement alone.
At large sample counts there is no competition. Synchrotron XRD is the only way to get quantitative mineralogy on hundreds or thousands of samples, at the same density as the assays, cost-effectively, accurately and in time to use it. The measurement runs at 8,000 to 10,000 samples a day, the analysis takes days, initial results are out generally five weeks from dispatch, depending on the volume, and the price per sample is 40 € at 250 samples and lower above that. A laboratory diffractometer measures one sample in minutes, so a campaign of thousands takes months, and the usual answer has been to scope the mineralogy down to a few hundred picked samples and infer the rest.
Why the price falls so steeply
The measurement itself takes about seven seconds per sample. What costs money at small sample counts is everything around it: booking the beamtime, setting up the run, shipping, the sample preparation line, the analysis setup. Those costs are much the same for 30 samples and for 300. At 50 samples the price is mostly setup. At 250 the setup is spread thin enough that measurement and analysis start to dominate, and those scale. Mintti, our analysis system built and optimised for synchrotron data, runs the analysis as one batch, thousands of samples in days.
Planning is the other lever. A project we know about in advance lets us book the beamtime for it, prepare the samples in one run, put people where they are needed and carry less risk. Each of these shows up in the price. A measurement plan for the year gets a better price than the same samples arriving in surprise batches.
So the per-sample price is not the number to plan with. The number to plan with is the project.
What it looks like in four situations
Exploration. The questions are binary and they come per target: is the mineral there, is there asbestos, how much. One target alone is a small set. Several targets batched into one project are 50 or 250 samples, and at 40 € per sample mineralogy can be run at the same density as the assays, instead of on a handful of picked samples. Batching is the exploration company’s lever: one project, one beamtime, one price.
Feasibility study. A mine in planning needs the full mineralogy of the deposit, every mineral and not only the valuable ones, for the permit, the flowsheet, the equipment and whatever sits between surface and ore. That is thousands of samples, and a planned synchrotron XRD project gives the full picture at a price per sample well below the 250-sample level. The planning is the point: a campaign designed around the drilling plan, with beamtimes booked for it, costs less than the same samples analysed as they turn up.
Operating mine. Mines monitor their process in real time, with instruments faster than any synchrotron campaign will be. SR-XRD there is about control: a precise reference set to check the fast measurements against, to calibrate and audit on-site instruments, to settle what a shift in the process actually was. 250 samples a year, 10,000 €, and about ten grams of pulp per sample is all that leaves the workings.
Waste and tailings. Small samples, unknown materials identified clearly, and trace phases found: minerals that earlier work missed or that nobody valued when the pile was built. The lever is gathering. Samples collected over time, or from several sites and sources, go into one project. 250 samples across a facility or a portfolio, 10,000 €.
Prices are Mineralytics’ 2026 planning prices, VAT 0 %.
