LoopX Takes Physical AI Underground With $4M Seed Backed by BDC and Orion
The Toronto- and Sudbury-based company, which has already deployed its collision-avoidance and productivity-monitoring technology at six mines across Canada, the U.S. and South Africa, will spend the money on applied AI engineering, customer success and go-to-market hiring.
LoopX Innovation Inc. has raised $4M in Seed financing led by BDC Seed Venture Fund and Orion Industrial Ventures, with Hatch participating as a returning strategic investor. Announced August 4, 2026, the round gives the Toronto- and Sudbury-based Physical AI company capital to expand applied AI engineering, customer success and go-to-market operations.
LoopX develops Physical AI for mining, combining Vision AI, LiDAR, RF sensor fusion and edge computing so equipment and personnel gain greater situational awareness in conditions where conventional sensing struggles. Its Collision Avoidance System provides 360-degree perception across line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions, while proprietary Thermal Vision AI is built to detect living things through dust, glare and total darkness. LoadSight pairs 3D LiDAR with edge AI to monitor dump-truck payload, cycle time and load-haul-dump performance, and BoomGuard addresses safety around jumbo drills, bolters and other boom-equipped machinery.
The company is not arriving at Seed with only a lab demonstration. With support from the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator, LoopX scaled its collision-avoidance and productivity-monitoring technology out of the lab into deployments across six mines in Canada, the United States and South Africa, creating six full-time jobs. It has filed five U.S. patents around its situational-awareness and productivity-monitoring technology, and in February 2026 it received $480,000 in FedNor support to accelerate commercialization of its generative AI-powered mining technologies. Generative AI is already integrated into LoadSight, allowing operators to query payload trends and loading inefficiencies in natural language.
Beyond hiring, the capital will advance a next-generation Vision-Language-Action Physical AI model, an effort to move the company's systems beyond perception toward decision-making and action.
Founded in January 2022, LoopX is led by CEO Dr. Chao Yu, CTO/CIO Dr. Lucas (Yaodong) Cui and Head of Product James Zhang. Bruce Huang was also an original co-founder, though his current status with the company is unconfirmed. Yu earned a PhD in autonomous-driving-related mechatronics from the University of Waterloo and spent more than eight years at General Motors in Shanghai and Michigan leading vehicle electrification and autonomous-driving projects. Cui completed doctoral and postdoctoral research at Waterloo focused on deep learning, autonomous systems and large-scale perception. LoopX began by developing autonomous last-mile delivery robots before redirecting its robotics and AI capabilities toward mining.
Industrial relationships provide the commercial scaffolding. LoopX has an active collaboration with Cementation Americas, where its Collision Avoidance System has been installed and tested across multiple pieces of mining equipment and is ready for site commissioning. In July 2026 it signed a three-year R&D partnership with Vale Base Metals to develop and validate Physical AI systems for underground autonomous mining fleets under live production conditions.
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About the Company
Expands Physical AI for autonomous mining operations.
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