Our Team

Gerard Barron

CEO & Chairman

Gerard Barron is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Metals Company, a role he has held since 2017. A seasoned entrepreneur, he launched his first venture while still in university in Australia and has since built multiple global companies across battery manufacturing, media, technology, and future-focused resource development.

Gerard believes that the nodule resource can serve as the foundation for an American industrial revival by providing a secure, abundant supply of nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese to reduce dependence on foreign adversaries while supporting domestic manufacturing, energy security, and advanced defense supply chains. Guided by first-principles thinking, Gerard’s thesis is that resource extraction should occur where it has the least impact on people and nature—a philosophy that drives the Company’s work in the abyssal zone of the Pacific Ocean, 1,000 miles southwest of San Diego. Approximately 4,000 meters below sea level, there are no Indigenous communities, and biomass is measured in mere grams per square meter. The Company’s resource consists of polymetallic nodules that rest unattached on the seafloor. Its projects have been ranked as the world’s largest undeveloped nickel deposit, with more than 1.6 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules in situ on the seafloor, containing high grades of nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese — essential inputs for U.S. battery production, grid infrastructure, and national defense technologies.

Gerard Barron

CEO & Chairman
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Erika Ilves

Chief Strategy Officer

Erika Ilves is an entrepreneur and seasoned strategy lead dedicated to creating the systems and conditions required to secure a safe future for the human species. She was co-founder of Offworld, an industrial robotics company, where she led a team of machine learning engineers to develop teachable mining robots, and was also co-founder of Shackleton Energy, where she developed an international public-private consortium to create technologies to extract water ice from the moon in order to fuel deep space missions from low Earth orbit, drastically reducing the costs of such missions. Erika’s 15 years of strategy consulting experience started with McKinsey & Company, where she served global and emerging markets financial institutions on strategy, performance and operational transformations; and later advised GCC governments and investors on transitioning to a green economy. Previously, Erika was an executive at videoconferencing technology firm TANDBERG (acquired by Cisco), where she was responsible for developing leadership and sales capability for the firm’s global sales force. At The Metals Company, Erika is working to build the world’s first vertically integrated clean energy ecosystem by establishing alliances with like-minded leaders in offshore, electric vehicles and renewable energy technology, as well as developing our transparent provenance strategy to enable The Metals Company to establish Clean Metals as a new purchasing category. She is fluent in English, Estonian, Russian and proficient in Danish and French.

Erika Ilves

Chief Strategy Officer
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Claire Dalgleish

Offshore Technical Lead

Claire is a benthic ecologist and marine environmental monitoring specialist with over 25 years’ experience in planning, managing and leading multi-discipline offshore surveys. In recent years she has specialised in deep water survey operations in the Arctic, Atlantic and North Pacific, including the Clarion Clipperton Zone. She has worked in the oil & gas, wet renewables, offshore dredging and aggregates, and deep-sea mining sectors her entire career, on a wide range of large offshore infrastructure projects at FEED, construction, installation, testing, maintenance, and decommissioning stages for companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, Wintershall, Dong Energy, RWE and TMC. She has participated in over 150 offshore campaigns to date in the context of EIA monitoring, strategic environmental assessment, habitat mapping, and environmental characterisation studies. Most of them as Client Representative, Party Chief or Principle/Lead. Claire’s extensive knowledge of monitoring equipment and methodologies gained from working offshore for a wide range of industries, academic partners, and regulators, together with her contract and project management experience enables her to successfully deliver offshore campaigns that are within project and regulatory scope both on a technical and HSE basis, and within the allocated project timelines. She applies the highest QA-QC standards in the field to ensure samples and data contributing to environmental assessments are of the highest standard, and scientifically robust. She joined TMC in 2020 as Offshore Technical Lead and has since lead 5 TMC offshore sampling campaigns, including the NORI Collector Test Monitoring campaigns in 2022.

Claire Dalgleish

Offshore Technical Lead
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