Eco Minerals
Eco Minerals, Inc. is a private Delaware company formed in 2025 and renamed from Deep Sea Rare Minerals on May 21, 2026. It has applied to the United States regulator for rights over ~148,087 km² of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and the western Pacific near Guam.
It holds no licence. What it has is an application that has passed two procedural checks, and the company itself says plainly that those determinations relate to completeness and queue position rather than approval. Underneath the application sits a working survey business that already earns revenue.
News and articles
Overview
- Incorporated in Delaware in 2025 as Deep Sea Rare Minerals and renamed Eco Minerals on May 21, 2026, by amendment to its certificate of incorporation. Head office at Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
- It is private and listed nowhere. The securities regulator’s register carries one filing for it, a notice of an exempt offering, with no ticker and no exchange.
- The application was filed on August 29, 2025, and has been amended three times. The regulator found substantial compliance in December 2025, which set its place in the queue, and full compliance on March 26, 2026.
- On July 7, 2026, it submitted a consolidated application for an exploration licence and a commercial recovery permit together, under a rule finalised in January 2026, covering ~148,087 km².
- Even after certification, any proposed issuance would still require a Federal Register notice, a 60 day comment period and a public hearing. None of that has happened.
- Its engineering is contracted out. A design agreement was signed on December 1, 2025, with a business unit of Oil States International as prime contractor, and preliminary design work completed in March 2026 selected Soil Machine Dynamics for a collector rated to 6,000 metres.
- The design parameters are modest by industry standards: 1.0 to 1.5 million wet tonnes of nodules a year, worked from chartered vessels of 130 to 150 metres, with a closed-loop riser and no mid-water discharge.
- Its survey arm, Deep Sea Vision, operates autonomous vehicles rated to 6,000 metres with synthetic aperture sonar, and announced the purchase of another in August 2026 for commercial charter in the Pacific.
- One funding round is disclosed: US$5.0 million of equity, sold in full to a single investor, with the first sale on January 21, 2026.
What it actually holds
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Exploration licence application, Clarion-Clipperton Zone and western Pacific near Guam | Filed August 29, 2025, and amended three times. Substantial compliance December 2025, full compliance March 26, 2026. Not granted. |
| Consolidated exploration licence and commercial recovery permit application | Submitted July 7, 2026, over ~148,087 km². Under review. Not granted. |
| Indications of interest for American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and Alaska | Non-binding expressions of interest to the offshore leasing regulator. They confer no lease and no mineral rights. |
| Any granted licence, permit or lease, from any authority anywhere | n/a |
| Resource estimate on its own ground | n/a |
The company describes its position as priority of right. That is a queue position, not a title to minerals. A sweep of the Federal Register shows the regulator has published notices of receipt naming several other applicants and none naming this company.
The survey business
- Deep Sea Vision runs Kongsberg autonomous vehicles rated to 6,000 metres, fitted with synthetic aperture sonar, multibeam, sub-bottom profiling and camera systems, containerised so they can work from vessels of opportunity.
- Its co-founder and chief operating officer ran that vehicle programme at the manufacturer for close to twenty years.
- The company calls it a profitable deep-ocean survey and data services business, and its regulatory filing self-reports revenue between US$1 million and US$5 million.
- Its own 2025 submission to the offshore leasing regulator discloses a 2024 survey of the American Samoa exclusive economic zone and a 2023 nodule discovery near Baker and Howland Islands, detail that appears in no press release.
- A separate United States filing by another company independently records this survey business running one of its vehicles inside a Cook Islands licence area in 2024.
- On August 25, 2026, it signed a contract with Deep Reach Technology of Stafford, Texas, to support a deep-sea environmental impact assessment inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone. The scope is a support vessel, autonomous vehicle systems, geophysical surveying, and environmental and geotechnical sampling. It is the first named commercial contract the survey arm has disclosed.
Ownership
There is no public cap table. The company is private and files nothing that would disclose one. The only ownership facts on the record are that a single unnamed investor bought the entire US$5.0 million offering in January 2026, and that the company’s own site names one individual as an early investor. Our own reporting in April 2026 noted it was seeking tens of millions more.
Listed exposure
There is none. Every listed name connected to this company is a counterparty rather than a holder: Oil States International as engineering prime contractor, Kongsberg as the supplier of its survey vehicles, and a non-binding memorandum with TMC’s United States subsidiary. None of them discloses any interest in the company.