Deep-sea battery-metal-mining company ghosted by key investor

If you think it’s annoying when a friend ghosts your $14 Venmo request for “🍻 ,” just imagine the frustration of The Metals Company, a deep sea, battery-metal mining company whose would-be $200 million investor has...simply ignored its promise to buy 20 million shares.

After going public in September, The Metals Company hasn’t received $200 million in funding promised by Ramas Capital Management, the Financial Times reports.

• The missing money makes up 60% of the company’s expected private equity in public investment (PIPE) funding, a common post-SPAC injection of cash from institutional investors.
• The company is now suing Ramas Capital Management in the New York Supreme Court.

Context, please: The Metals Company claims it has developed an environmentally friendly way of extracting rare earth metals, like lithium, nickel, and cobalt, from the ocean floor. These metals are necessary to make batteries, and they’re also expected to be in relatively short supply as electric vehicle demand cranks up. The Metals Company says it’s already identified enough metals to power 280 million EVs, but the environmental consequences of deep sea mining are unclear.

• In June, 617 marine scientists and policy experts signed a statement calling for a pause on deep-sea mining, “until sufficient and robust scientific information has been obtained to make informed decisions as to whether deep-sea mining can be authorized without significant damage to the marine environment.”

Looking ahead: As FT points out, this leaves The Metals Company with just over $100 million in cash-on-hand, which the company says is “sufficient capital” to meet its goals. But in March it said it’d need $163 million for operations over the next two years, and the company has previously said it will need $7 billion to scale up production in the US by 2026.