Maxim Kuzemchenko
Industrial entrepreneur, operator & investor.
Founder and CEO of Archetype. I have built and scaled industrial businesses across mining, engineering and technology — most recently growing a mid-sized coal producer into a $1.5 billion mining business of international scale.
Today I lead Archetype, an owner-operator platform built to acquire, modernise and compound the value of businesses in physical industries.
Biography
Building industrial capacity, improving operating systems and growing complex businesses has been the through-line of my career.
That experience is also the foundation of my approach to AI, developed through OES Ventures, my industrial AI company. In physical industries, value is created when technology moves all the way from data and recommendations to decisions, action and measurable improvement in the economics of the asset. This is the operating logic behind Archetype.
I founded Archetype around a conviction shaped by years of building and transforming industrial businesses: the next stage of growth does not always require more equipment. Often, it starts with getting more from what is already there.
Starting with contract mining, Archetype aims to acquire established businesses and improve how they operate. We combine hands-on industrial leadership with AI-enabled tools to identify operational losses, coordinate people and equipment, and turn improvements into stronger earnings and cash flow.
Our approach begins before an acquisition: understand the operations, test the improvement potential and let that evidence inform the investment. Each business we transform should deepen our expertise and make the next transformation more effective.
Acquire · Transform · Learn · Compound
Writing
AI can be taught quickly to watch millions of discrete operations, spot what is wrong and decide what to correct. But in the end the correction is carried out by people — with their limits of attention, fatigue, skill and engagement. That gap is what I write about.
Improving fleet performance at a working mine
Picture a construction site the size of a city that never stops: 200 haul trucks, 40 excavators, 80 bulldozers, 1.2 million tonnes of rock a day. Every truck waiting at the wrong shovel burns money and diesel.
The usual fix is more trucks. We bought none. Over four years we changed how the fleet was managed, one layer at a time — people and rules, then software, then AI — until AI was balancing the fleet in real time, with people supervising.
Figures are 2025 against a 2021–2022 baseline, as reported by the operation.
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Ventures
Companies I have founded or co-founded.