Geopyörä strengthens leadership for its next phase of global growth
By Geopyörä
Sarah Hoffman appointed Chief Executive Officer as founder Marcos de Paiva Bueno transitions to Chief Technology Officer
Oulu, Finland – 20 September 2026 – Geopyörä Oy today announced the appointment of Sarah Hoffman as Chief Executive Officer, effective 5 October 2026, as the company strengthens its leadership team for its next phase of global commercial growth.
The appointment follows Geopyörä’s recent seed investment from Chrysalix Venture Capital and reflects the company’s ambition to scale its technology and customer reach across the global mining industry.
Geopyörä has commercialised a new approach to orebody characterisation by generating spatially dense hardness and breakage data from samples already used in existing geological and assay workflows. Today, the mining industry performs roughly one comminution test for every 10,000 grade assays. Geopyörä closes that gap. Its ambition is to make ore hardness information as routine and actionable as grade data, helping mining companies better understand and manage ore variability across exploration, mine planning, and processing, and forecast throughput and operating costs across the life of mine through improved timely decision making with greater confidence and accuracy.
Sarah brings more than two decades of international mining and industrial leadership experience across BHP, Sandvik, and Epiroc, spanning North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Her career has combined direct mining-industry experience with global leadership of mining technology and equipment businesses, with broad responsibility for sales and commercial growth, product and portfolio strategy, long-term technology and development roadmaps, organisational and operational transformation, global production footprint, M&A and integration, and P&L performance.
As CEO, Sarah will focus on Geopyörä’s commercial scale-up, global growth, customer and market development, and organisational evolution as the company moves into its next phase of industrial scale-up and broader market adoption.
At the same time, founder and current CEO Marcos de Paiva Bueno will transition to the role of Chief Technology Officer and continue serving on Geopyörä’s Board. In his new role, Marcos will lead the continued development of Geopyörä’s technology, product roadmap, and technical vision, working closely with our customers and the company’s team of mining, geology, metallurgy, and technology specialists to maximise customer value creation.
The transition gives Geopyörä dedicated leadership on both sides of the opportunity: scaling the business globally while continuing to advance the technology and scientific capability at its core.
Rob Stephens, Chair of the Board of Geopyörä, said:
“Sarah brings a rare combination of deep mining-industry understanding, global commercial leadership, and experience scaling complex industrial businesses. Geopyörä has reached a key inflexion point in its development. Strengthening the executive team in this way gives us dedicated leadership for both global commercial growth and continued technology development. That combination positions the company well for its next stage of scale.”
Marcos de Paiva Bueno, founder and incoming Chief Technology Officer, said:
“We started Geopyörä because mining measures grade with thousands of assays and ore hardness with only a handful of tests. We have spent years proving that hardness can be measured at assay scale, using the same samples and fitting into the same laboratory workflow. Sarah joining gives us the leadership capacity to put real force behind scaling that opportunity globally, while allowing me to focus even more deeply on advancing the technology and its applications. I am very much looking forward to what we build together to create value for our customers.”
Sarah Hoffman, incoming Chief Executive Officer, said:
“What attracted me to Geopyörä is the opportunity to change something very fundamental in an industry I have spent most of my career working in. Mining has become extraordinarily sophisticated in many areas, yet our understanding and use of ore hardness data has remained surprisingly limited. Geopyörä has the potential to turn that on its head.
I am excited not only by the technology, but by the deeply experienced and diverse team behind it, people with real-world mining experience who are committed to making this capability more accessible, more useful, and much more widely understood across the industry.”
Following its recent investment, Geopyörä is expanding its team, commercial reach, and global network of licensed laboratories and on-site mine installations as it works to bring high-resolution ore hardness characterisation into routine mining and exploration workflows globally.
Understand ore hardness, maximise mine value.
About Geopyörä
Geopyörä is a Finnish mining technology company focused on geometallurgy and orebody knowledge, helping exploration and mining companies understand and manage ore variability at a level of resolution not previously practical, to make timely, much improved decisions along the orebody lifecycle.
Its patented technology generates high-quality, spatially dense ore hardness and breakage data from small geological samples already available within existing workflows, enabling mining companies to build a much richer understanding of ore variability without the cost and complexity of traditional comminution testing programmes.
This information supports better decision-making across exploration, geometallurgy, mine planning, comminution design, and process optimisation, improving the accuracy of throughput and operating-cost forecasts and supporting better decisions in blasting, blending, plant design, and process optimisation.
Geopyörä works with exploration and mining companies as well as laboratory partners globally to make ore hardness data faster, more accessible, and more useful across the mining value chain.