Mining technology has a credibility problem that most vendors never quite solve. A software company can build a beautifully designed dashboard, pitch it as a digital transformation solution, and still watch it fail on site because it was never tested against the reality of an underground crew working a night shift with wet gloves and a deadline. The gap between what looks good in a boardroom demo and what survives contact with an actual mine is where most mining software goes to die.
Digital Terrain built its Simbio platform from the other direction. The company’s founding team were miners before they became technologists, and that background is reflected in how the platform is structured and where it has found traction.
A decade of iteration before the spin-off
Simbio’s history stretches back further than Digital Terrain’s own founding. The core product began as MANAGE, a spreadsheet-based tool that transitioned to a web-based platform in 2011, years before Digital Terrain existed as a standalone company. PLOD, an operational tracking tool, went into field trials in 2015 and was deployed after testing at the Deep South mine in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields and the Carrapateena mine in South Australia the following year. By 2017, the system had completed a large-scale rollout across more than 20 implementations at its first customer, and by 2018 maintenance modules had been added, completing the digitisation of an entire underground crew’s workflow.
Digital Terrain only spun out as an independent company in 2019, when the internal Business Systems team behind these tools separated from its parent operation in response to customer demand. That sequence matters. Simbio was not built as a product looking for a market. It was refined inside an operating mining business for the better part of a decade before Digital Terrain began selling it to other operators.
Where the platform concentrates its effort
Simbio’s structure reflects problems that surface repeatedly on underground sites rather than a generic enterprise software feature list. Its Regulated Materials module, built around the Magman product, digitises explosives magazine record keeping. The system uses intrinsically safe tablets approved for use inside explosives magazines and certified by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Manufacturing and Regional and Rural Development, among other regulators. That is a narrow, specific compliance problem, and the kind of specialised solution a generalist software vendor would be unlikely to prioritise or get certified for.
The Operational Technology group addresses environmental monitoring, tracking temperature, wind speed, dust, and dangerous gases to trigger ventilation fans and reduce wait times after blasting. It also covers maintenance scheduling, underground communications, and machine data analysis.
The Paperless Operations group removes paper-based forms and activity tracking from site processes entirely. According to the company’s own figures, its deployments have saved more than 300,000 sheets of A4 paper and around 24,000 hours of administrative work, while tracking more than 5.1 million tonnes of bogged material across more than 72 sites globally.
Market share as a credibility signal
By 2021, Digital Terrain had reached roughly 50% market share of the underground mining industry in New Zealand, growing to around 75% by 2023. That level of market share in a specialised software category is meaningful because underground mine sites tend to be conservative technology buyers. Safety-critical software gets adopted slowly and only after other operators can vouch for it under real operating conditions, which makes sustained market share gains harder to manufacture through marketing alone.
The company’s growth has continued through a combination of acquisitions and organic development. Digital Terrain acquired Magman in 2022, bringing regulated materials management fully in-house, and acquired a maintenance management system along with its South African customer base in 2023. It has also expanded into Internet of Things (IoT) device sales for the European tunnelling industry in early 2023. Later that same year, it implemented Simbio in its first underground coal mine using specialised intrinsically safe devices, a deployment that reflects the additional certification burden coal environments carry compared to hard rock operations.
Leadership with mining backgrounds, not just software backgrounds
Digital Terrain’s leadership team reinforces the same operator-first positioning. CEO Andrew Rouse has direct experience as a mine owner, contractor, director, and founder within the sector. The general managers overseeing IoT, regulated materials, and drone and digitisation functions each carry mining engineering or mine management backgrounds rather than pure software credentials. For a platform whose value proposition rests on understanding what actually happens on an underground shift, that composition of leadership is directly relevant to how the product gets built and prioritised.
With continued investment in sensors, automation, machine data, and AI-driven decision support, Digital Terrain is positioning Simbio for the next phase of mine digitisation. The platform builds on a product history that predates much of the current wave of mining technology vendors by close to a decade.
Image Credit: digitalterrain.io
