Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are among the billionaires paying a total of $15 million to fund a search for metals used in electric vehicles

• KoBold Metals, backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, will hunt for metals in Greenland.
• The mineral company will spend $15 million looking for materials with mining firm BlueJay.
• Bill Gates' climate and technology fund is KoBold Metals' principal investor.

A mineral company backed by billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, on Monday agreed to join mining firm Bluejay to hunt for metals used in electric vehicles.

KoBold Metals will spend $15 million to search for nickel, copper, cobalt, and platinum as part of BlueJay's Disko-Nuussuaq project in Greenland, the world's biggest island, BlueJay said in a statement.

In return, KoBold will have a 51% stake in the project, London-based Bluejay said.

KoBold, which is privately owned, uses artificial intelligence, machines, and computing to look for the raw materials needed for electric vehicles, according to its website.

The mineral company's principal investor is Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate and technology fund led by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the statement said.

Read more: Why lithium mines in Cornwall could attract Elon Musk's Tesla to the UK - and ease China's stranglehold on the electric car market

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio are also investors, according to the statement.

Other investors in KoBold include Silicon Valley VC fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor.

KoBold CEO Kurt House said in the statement: "The Disko region has seen the rare convergence of events in earth's history that could have resulted in forming a world-class battery metal deposit."

"Disko is a project with great potential for the discovery of globally significant deposits of battery metals," Blueyjay's CEO Bo Møller Stensgaard added.