When Seequent Evo was introduced at PDAC 2025, it marked a decisive moment for Seequent and for the mining industry. What progress has been made in the year since that milestone? Colleen O’Hanlon writes.
Evo, Seequent’s powerful geoscience data and compute platform, was launched with a clear ambition: to break down long‑standing barriers created by fragmented data, siloed tools, and disconnected workflows. It promised an open, interoperable foundation that would be capable of supporting the next era of digital mining.
Twelve months on, Evo – together with native applications Driver and BlockSync – is now in the hands of customers who are using it to solve operational challenges and unlock new value across the mining lifecycle.
As Seequent Vice President Platform Success David Peres reflected, real-world use cases have revealed new, and sometimes unexpected ways customers are putting Evo to work, reshaping what success looks like in digital mining workflows in their organisations.
‘When you put something as flexible as Evo out there, a lot of your hunches come back not 100% correct – customers show you workflows you never planned for, and they see value in them,’ Peres said.
Evo’s first year has been defined by customer adoption and meaningful progress. Today, Evo is being used by customers ranging from junior and mid‑tier miners to global majors, as well as leading mining consultancies, supporting both open‑pit and underground operations. Customers are using the platform to improve data consistency, accelerate planning cycles, and reduce manual reconciliation. Evo is being applied to streamline technical workflows and integrations, including Deswik and Orica.
‘Driver has been our leading Evo capability since launch. People run it once and say, ‘‘It took us months to put manual trend models for our deposit together manually – and Driver showed me things I never realised were there’’,’ Peres said. ‘Driver will produce the same outcome every time… that repeatability and consistency builds trust.’
‘What resonates a lot are the downstream effects – not just the first picture Driver gives them, but how much more accurate their Leapfrog models become. That’s the power of it being part of the platform.’
Chief Executive Officer Graham Grant and Chief Customer Officer Angela Harvey explain how Seequent Evo is redefining how customers can work with their data to drive innovation.
Credit: Seequent
Real customers, real outcomes
SRK Consulting: unlocking latent value in legacy deposits with Evo and Driver
Even well‑drilled deposits can still hold untapped value – particularly when legacy interpretations are revisited with modern tools. That was the challenge facing SRK Consulting Principal Resource Geologist Matthew Hastings when reassessing a historic gold deposit that had been in care and maintenance for several years.
Despite extensive drilling and sampling, the geological interpretation underpinning the resource was built using early‑2000s software and legacy assumptions. Instead, SRK saw an opportunity to re‑evaluate the deposit using artificial intelligence and connected workflows.
Working with Seequent, SRK applied Driver, alongside Leapfrog Geo, to rapidly reinterpret grade continuity directly from raw drilling data. Rather than relying on rigid, global assumptions about mineralisation trends, Driver generated data‑driven local structural insights that could be immediately tested and integrated into a modern geological model.
Driver analysis results colored by automatic cluster groupings. A) Stereonet showing poles to planes of the legacy global mineralisation trend (yellow star) and the Driver-generated local ellipsoids (coloured dots). B) Cross section slice showing drilling data within the proposed future mining area, colored by Au assay. C) Driver-generated local ellipsoids delineating the potential presence of an overturned fold. D) Cross section slice of dipping shears in the second deposit, coloured by automatic cluster groupings.
The results validated aspects of the legacy interpretation, but also revealed previously unrecognised structural complexity, including local variations in dip and the presence of folded mineralisation that had not been captured in earlier models. These insights were particularly significant in areas targeted for potential near‑term mining, where a more accurate understanding of grade continuity could materially influence future decisions.
By combining Evo’s cloud‑based data and compute capabilities with Driver’s artificial intelligence analysis and Leapfrog Geo’s implicit modelling, SRK was able to generate a more geologically coherent model in minutes rather than days – with far less manual intervention.
For SRK, the value of Evo and Driver lies not just in speed, but in confidence.
‘What stood out to me was how efficiently the new structural inputs could be generated,’ Matthew Hastings, Principal Resource Geologist at SRK said. ‘As a consultant working across many projects and on tight time frames, I am excited to be able to build a domain model that is more geologically coherent and connected with the data, far faster and efficiently than I ever could have with a conventional implicit or explicit approach.’
OceanaGold: realising value through seamless data integration at Waihi
The figure on the left shows where Driver ellipsoids have highlighted an unmodelled mineralised structural trend in the drillhole data set. The figure on the right shows the splay wireframed after identifying with Driver ellipsoids.
Source: OceanaGold
Toronto Stock Exchange-listed OceanaGold has discovered the transformative potential of Evo and Driver at its Waihi underground mine in New Zealand’s North Island.
OceanaGold recovered additional gold – and identified potentially millions more in deposits – through intelligent, streamlined workflows. There, the integration of Driver enabled seamless connectivity between geology and mine planning teams, eliminating manual data transfers and reducing friction which previously slowed operations.
For OceanaGold, the deployment of Driver provided immediate value, allowing geologists to uncover unmodelled mineral structures with confidence. In one instance, the identification and estimation of a new vein splay – facilitated by Driver’s advanced analytics – took just one hour from insight to integration into the mine’s planning model.
‘The accuracy and speed of Driver when it comes to identifying structural trends simply means that smaller veins, which may once have been overlooked, are now easily found. In this case the whole process took me one hour, which is a pretty good return on the investment of my time,’ Willi Vigor-Brown, Superintendent of Mine Geology, at the company’s Waihi Operation, said. ‘Without Driver, I probably wouldn’t have seen it. I wouldn’t have modelled it.’ OceanaGold’s experience showcases how Evo and Driver are redefining the standards for geological interpretation, collaboration, and value creation in mining.
The platform advantage: Evo + Driver + BlockSync
Evo’s strength lies in how its components work together to create a unified, connected environment.
| Component | Role | Value delivered |
| Evo | Open platform for data and workflows | Unified environment, interoperability, single source of truth |
| Driver | Workflow automation engine | Discovery and automation |
| BlockSync | Data synchronisation and model management | Consistency across teams, reduced versioning issues |
Together, Evo, Driver and BlockSync form a digital backbone that supports real‑time collaboration, reduces operational friction, and enables more confident decision‑making.
The ecosystem advantage: why openness wins
Mining companies are increasingly rejecting closed, monolithic systems. They want flexibility, interoperability, and the ability to integrate best‑in‑class tools across the value chain.
Evo is becoming a connective layer across the mining lifecycle – linking geology, engineering, operations, and partner technologies into a cohesive digital ecosystem.
Read more: Openness will shape the future of geoscience
This openness is accelerating innovation, reducing duplication, and enabling customers to build workflows that reflect their unique operational realities.
‘What’s really cool with Evo is that they’re not going to need us to solve those problems. They’ll be able to do it themselves – and we’re already seeing moves in that direction,’ Peres said. ‘Customers want flexibility. They want to use the tools that work for them – and connect them into a workflow. Evo lets them do that.’
Seequent Vice President Platform Success David Peres, left and Taronish Pithawala, Director, Product Management – Evo, right.
Source: Seequent
Seequent and Orica partnership
Seequent’s open approach is reflected in a new partnership with Orica which brings together Orica’s deep domain expertise and Evo’s flexible, integration‑first platform. The collaboration demonstrates how Evo can connect into complex operational environments, supporting existing systems while enabling more seamless data flows and collaboration across teams. For Orica, Evo provides a configurable foundation that can evolve with changing operational and customer needs; for Evo, the partnership is a practical example of how openness and interoperability translate into real‑world value.
Deswik integration
This integration allows mine design data to move directly from Deswik into Evo and Leapfrog without intermediate formats or manual reprocessing. The result is faster, more informed decision‑making, with geologists and engineers working from a single source of truth and smoother, more connected workflows. This exemplifies Evo’s goal of open interoperability and real-world value.
Looking ahead: what year two will bring
Taronish Pithawala, Director, Product Management – Evo, said the next phase of Evo’s evolution is focused on deepening its role as a core platform. Pithawala explained that year two would be about embedding Evo more tightly into the products and workflows customers already rely on, while continuing to simplify adoption at scale.
‘In 2026, we’re taking a lot of steps so that Evo is something for all of our customers – not just something on the side,’ he said.
The intent is to make Evo an everyday part of how work gets done across the mining lifecycle – from exploration through to production – while preserving the openness that allows customers to integrate their own tools, systems, and processes.
At the same time, Evo’s roadmap is being shaped by a broader industry challenge: a workforce under increasing pressure from growing complexity, shrinking experience pools, and rising expectations for speed and accuracy. Pithawala sees advances in AI as a powerful new way to address this long‑standing issue, provided they are delivered with the right level of trust and governance.
‘AI is giving us a new tool to solve an old problem – a problem that’s been getting worse over time,’ he said.
The focus is on augmenting human expertise with greater consistency and precision, while applying the same standards of oversight and accountability that mining companies expect of their people.
In this way, Evo’s future is not just about more technology, but about enabling better decisions, made faster, with confidence grounded in connected data and trusted processes.
‘Our customers look to us for trusted algorithms, for trusted processes, for trusted software that they can use to make some very important decisions,’ he said.
Seequent Segment Director Mining Dr Janina Elliott tells how one customer successfully reduced project risk by 60 per cent using Seequent Evo.
Source: Seequent