Branding the $150m company built on two decades of CSIRO sensing technology

MagnaTerra Technologies is the company behind the worlds most advanced magnetic resonance technology, and pointing that tech at two very different problems. Through NextOre, sensors hang over conveyor belts at copper mines and read the grade of every tonne going past. Through MRead, a hand-held scanner finds the explosive sitting inside a buried landmine. Both work on magnetic resonance, a close cousin of the hospital MRI, developed over two decades at CSIRO research.

Mude built the brand and the website the group took to investors. MagnaTerra sells nothing itself: it holds the CSIRO licences, employs the scientists and takes the investment, while the customers belong to the divisions. Mude branded the new parent company and pulled together the website for the group prior to the two spinouts merging in July 2025 whilst pulling off a $11 million raise at a $150 million valuation.

$150m
Valuation at launch: $11m
Raise the brand went to market for: 2
CSIRO spinouts merged into one parent

Background

The two companies underneath MagnaTerra had been running in parallel for years on the same science, with the same investors on both registers.

NextOre started in 2017 as a joint venture between CSIRO, RFC Ambrian and Worley, and by the time of the merger it had a working track record in some difficult places. Its analysers sit above conveyor belts and read the mineral grade of the ore passing beneath them, which lets an operator reject waste rock before it reaches the processing plant and save the water, power and chemicals that would have been spent on it.

MRead started in 2023, aimed at a problem the world has been losing ground on for decades. Deminers work with metal detectors, and former battlefields are full of metal, so in Angola it takes an average of 136 excavations to find and clear a single landmine, with each item taking half an hour or more to identify by hand.

MRead’s scanner reads the molecular signature of the explosive instead. Trials with The HALO Trust in Angola in 2024 indicated clearance could run at least 30 per cent faster, and that operators were effective on the device after about thirty minutes of training.

The parent company holds the technology licences from CSIRO, employs the science and engineering team, sets group strategy and takes in the capital. Every customer relationship sits one level down. So the identity had a narrow audience and a clear order: investors first, and the scientists and engineers the group needed to hire second. Mining customers stay with NextOre. Demining organisations and defence buyers stay with MRead.

Mude had worked inside the group before the parent existed. In 2024 we ran NextOre’s brand strategy, identity and website, across three workshop phases plus an identity workshop and a website discovery, about eleven hours of structured workshop time. That produced a positioning statement, brand purpose and vision, four values, a three-pillar messaging architecture and an evolved identity built on what NextOre already had.

It also mapped the five audiences the business sells across, from mine general managers and technical services managers through to the boards approving the capital. The brand voice that came out of it was deliberately understated, which the team had asked for in plain terms: back the claims up, and skip the arm-waving.

The brandmark

Three pillars stand in a row, one for each company in the group. They share a baseline, and each one is sliced off across the top at the same angle. Read as a set they resolve into a lettermark M.

The wordmark sits against it in a high-contrast display serif, fine hairlines and a slightly calligraphic g, noticeably more classical than the geometry beside it. We liked how the two read together and it was approved on that basis.

Colour

Magna Orange is #F65B1B, and it came from copper, the mineral NextOre’s sensors were built to sort.

It sits against Obsidian Black at #0B0B0B and White Stone at #EEEDED, with the proportions set at roughly 40 per cent black and a quarter each of orange and off-white. A steel blue, a pale blue and a deep iron red are held back to three or four per cent for charts and secondary graphics. In print the black is specified as a rich black at C60 M40 Y40 K100 rather than a flat K100, which is what gives it depth on a printed cover.

Twelve colour pairings are approved across the system and anything outside those twelve is unauthorised. It is a tight allow-list for a brand with six colours in it, and it is what keeps the palette from drifting once the guide is in other people’s hands.

The signature asset is a set of liquid gradients, out of focus and warm, with no hard edge anywhere in them. They look like poured metal caught halfway through moving, and they are magnetic resonance made visible.

There was a practical problem underneath that decision. Magnetic resonance travels as radio waves, which leaves a camera with very little to point at, and a company raising capital on the strength of an invisible technology still needs something to put on a cover, a slide and a letterhead.

The guide sets the gradients primarily as backgrounds, with a standing instruction to prioritise the legibility of anything laid over them, and it defines five distinct treatments: a deep black S-curve through burnt orange, a cool silver-and-white fold over a hot base, parallel diagonal ribbons like brushed metal under raking light, a warm orange fold with a soft crease, and a dark void with orange wrapping around it.

Typography

Forma DJR Text carries headlines, body copy, labels and interface, running across four levels of hierarchy. It is David Jonathan Ross’s revival of a neo-grotesque, with slightly soft terminals that hold up at small sizes.

Scheherazade New handles subheadings and captions, an open old-style serif released through SIL, and the guide gives it the only page in 45 that departs from black, which signals that the face plays a different role from the rest of the system. Inter Tight sits underneath as the fallback. Line height runs 120 to 140 per cent on body copy and 95 to 105 on headings, tightening as the type gets larger.

Where it landed

The identity was codified into a 45-page guide, running the system through business cards, letterhead, internal reports, presentations and digital communications.

Its own sample copy describes the group as delivering tough tech for tough industries, and sets out an ambition to grow into a self-sustaining global leader recognised as an employer of choice for scientists and engineers.

MagnaTerra’s site was rebuilt on the identity in 2026. NextOre’s was rebuilt alongside it, in Spanish as well as English for the Latin American operations, and now signs off as a MagnaTerra company. MRead holds a $1.6 million Australian Government Industry Growth Program grant to take its MineReader from prototype to first sales, NextOre has development agreements with CSIRO and an Australian miner to extend the sensing into lithium and iron ore, and the group is working toward a listing.