Cummins Confidential : First Mode Filed Chapter 11, Cummins Bought The Fucking Toolbox

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There are several ways to become a technology company. You can spend years hiring engineers, burning capital, smashing prototypes into reality and finding out which beautiful ideas were actually expensive pieces of shit. Alternatively, you can wait until somebody else has done most of that work, watch their financial oxygen disappear, arrive during the sale process and buy the fucking toolbox.

Welcome to First Mode.

Cummins is once again talking up the hybrid-electric mining retrofit system now sitting inside its portfolio, including the deployment at Lundin Mining’s Caserones copper operation in Chile. The system captures energy during braking, stores it in batteries and returns it during propulsion, reducing the demand placed on the diesel engine underneath. Yet before this technology became part of the Cummins story, it had already accumulated years of development, outside investment, engineering risk and one particularly unpleasant encounter with the bankruptcy court.

That history is much more interesting than the current corporate wrapping.

Before Cummins Arrived

First Mode was not invented in Columbus after somebody opened Copilot and typed “make mining greener”. Years before Cummins bought anything, the engineering company was already working with Anglo American on technology connected to the miner’s FutureSmart Mining programme, including the enormous zero-emissions haulage project that eventually produced Anglo’s hydrogen-battery mine truck at Mogalakwena in South Africa.

This was serious engineering rather than a sustainability graphic with wheels attached. The vehicle had to combine batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, regenerative braking, power management, software and the brutal operating requirements of a haul truck capable of carrying roughly 290 tonnes. Consequently, First Mode spent years learning what happened when the elegant clean-energy concept met dust, gradients, payloads and machinery large enough to flatten the fucking presentation deck.

By 2022, Anglo American was sufficiently committed to put another $200 million behind the project and combine its nuGen zero-emissions haulage programme with First Mode. The resulting business was valued at around $1.5 billion, while Anglo became the majority shareholder and the whole thing marched forwards under the usual promises of industrial transformation.

Then somebody eventually opened the spreadsheet.

The $1.5 Billion Dream Meets Reality

Two years later, Anglo American was reorganising its own capital priorities and decided to conclude funding for First Mode. Suddenly, a business that had recently been valued around $1.5 billion was looking for strategic alternatives, outside investment and potential buyers while the clock began making considerably more noise.

That is the part of corporate innovation stories which rarely survives into the polished retrospective. The giant prototype remains photogenic, the engineering milestone remains impressive and the old press releases stay online, but the money underneath the dream has developed a fucking leak.

First Mode began exploring a sale and other options as management tried to preserve the business. However, the timetable became increasingly compressed, and by December 2024 the process had moved from strategic discussion into something considerably less glamorous.

On 15 December 2024, the First Mode board filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code.

The revolution now had lawyers.

First Mode Becomes The Mine

Chapter 11 did not mean the underlying technology had suddenly become worthless. Quite the opposite: the entire point of the court-supervised process was to preserve and sell assets that still had commercial value even though the company carrying them could no longer continue in its existing form.

That is when Cummins arrived.

On 11 February 2025, Cummins announced that it had acquired First Mode assets. The word “assets” makes the transaction sound almost quaint, as though Cummins picked up a prototype, a few patents and somebody’s battered toolbox from the corner of a workshop.

The actual package was much richer. Cummins acquired First Mode’s hybrid mining and rail product lines, intellectual property covering hydrogen and battery powertrain technologies, commercial portfolio and technical capabilities. First Mode’s own announcement also described the transfer of the brand, manufacturing and testing capability, proving grounds and substantial engineering, deployment, commercial, operations and manufacturing expertise across multiple countries.

That is not buying a screwdriver.

That is buying the fucking workshop.

The Corporate Strip Mine

There is no allegation of theft here. Cummins bought the assets through a legitimate sale process after First Mode’s funding collapsed, which is precisely why the story does not need embellishment.

The irony does the work for us.

First Mode had spent years developing technology intended to extract minerals more cleanly from mines. Then, after Anglo American stopped funding it and Chapter 11 arrived, First Mode itself became the mine.

The valuable seams were suddenly obvious: patents, engineers, products, testing facilities, customer relationships, proving capability and years of accumulated knowledge. Cummins could survey the site, identify what remained commercially useful and acquire the pieces capable of surviving the company that created them.

Corporate decarbonisation by extraction.

Even Hunter Valley would appreciate the fucking symmetry.

“Developed By First Mode”

The provenance did not disappear immediately after the sale. In May 2025, when Cummins was presenting the hybrid-electric retrofit prototype at The Electric Mine, its own newsroom used four particularly useful words to describe the system:

“developed by First Mode”.

Thank you.

That wording matters because it preserves something corporate ownership naturally tends to compress over time. The hybrid system did not suddenly emerge from Cummins engineering the morning after the purchase agreement was signed. Instead, Cummins acquired a body of technology that had already been designed, tested, financed, modified and dragged through years of expensive development by First Mode and its backers.

As the acquisition settled in, however, the language naturally shifted. The system became part of Cummins’ portfolio, the people became Cummins people, deployment became Cummins deployment and the technology increasingly entered the corporate present tense.

Ownership changed.

The history did not.

Paint It Red

Nobody should be shocked that Cummins puts its name on technology it legally owns. That would be an idiotic criticism and, more importantly, it would miss the much better story.

Acquisitions have a remarkable ability to clean up chronology.

Years of outside investment, development risk, technical failures, pivots, test programmes and financial distress become compressed into the neat current-tense language of the buyer. Eventually, the messy years before acquisition start disappearing beneath the new corporate identity, while the surviving technology appears increasingly native to whoever owns the keys today.

Cummins has the product.

Cummins has the engineers.

Cummins has the commercial deployment.

Cummins has the newsroom.

Meanwhile, First Mode’s expensive prehistory starts settling underneath the surface like another geological layer.

Fortunately, TCAP enjoys digging.

From Hydrogen Revolution To Diesel Assistance

There is another useful seam running through this story because the technology itself changed direction before Cummins arrived.

The grand Anglo American and First Mode vision centred heavily on zero-emissions haulage, including the enormous hydrogen-battery truck unveiled at Mogalakwena. Yet hydrogen infrastructure at mining scale proved rather more difficult than announcing hydrogen infrastructure at mining scale, and the wider programme evolved accordingly.

Hybrid-electric retrofits therefore became a more immediate route.

Instead of replacing the diesel powertrain completely, the hybrid system keeps the existing truck and uses battery storage plus regenerative braking to reduce the workload placed on the engine. Energy that would otherwise disappear during braking can be captured and reused, while the diesel engine remains firmly installed underneath the whole fucking proposition.

That would already be amusing enough.

Unfortunately for Cummins, TCAP had spent the same day reading its marine decarbonisation material.

The Diesel Engine Survives Another Revolution

Only hours earlier, Cummins had explained that practical marine decarbonisation involves “bridge technologies”, hybrid systems, alternative fuels and preserved diesel capability because the clean-energy future remains constrained by infrastructure, economics and reality.

Now mining has arrived carrying the sequel.

Once again, the revolution becomes practical at precisely the point where the diesel engine is allowed to remain in the machine. The battery assists it, regenerative braking reduces its workload and emissions can fall, but the internal-combustion engine survives underneath the new transition-era terminology.

There is a pattern here.

The destination keeps changing.

The engine keeps making the fucking journey.

Cummins Bought Time

That is ultimately what the First Mode acquisition gave Cummins.

Not merely hardware.

Time already spent.

First Mode had already invested years in engineers, prototypes, testing, mistakes, intellectual property and customer relationships. Anglo American and other backers had already financed large parts of the expensive learning curve, while mine sites and giant haul trucks had already exposed the ideas that looked brilliant in conference rooms but behaved differently once somebody attached 290 tonnes of reality.

When Cummins bought the assets, it therefore bought more than technology. It acquired the benefit of years that had already passed and costs that had already been incurred elsewhere.

That is what acquisitions are supposed to do.

It is also why the acquisition date cannot be allowed to become Year Zero.

The Founders’ Discount

The financial trajectory is brutal enough without TCAP decorating it.

In 2022, Anglo American injected another $200 million into the combined First Mode business, which was valued at around $1.5 billion. By late 2024, Anglo had decided to stop funding it. Chapter 11 followed in December, and Cummins acquired the valuable assets in February 2025.

Cummins did not disclose a purchase price in its acquisition announcement, so TCAP will not invent one merely because a juicy number would make the paragraph easier.

The established sequence is already sufficient.

First Mode had once been part of a billion-dollar clean-mining ambition. Funding subsequently disappeared, bankruptcy protection followed and Cummins acquired the brand, technology, intellectual property, commercial portfolio, capabilities and people it wanted from the resulting process.

Cummins was not buying the 2022 dream.

It was shopping after the markdown sticker appeared.

The Toolbox Has A New Owner

Today the technology continues working. At Caserones, the hybrid system captures braking energy, feeds power back into propulsion and reduces demand on the underlying engine. Meanwhile, the engineering accumulated during the First Mode years has not vanished simply because ownership changed.

What has changed is the corporate genealogy.

First Mode becomes First Mode at Cummins.

That phrasing may be entirely accurate, yet it compresses a long industrial history into a very convenient handful of words. Years of engineering effort, Anglo American money, technical pivots, financial distress and Chapter 11 disappear behind the present owner.

First Mode spent years filling the toolbox.

Anglo American helped pay for the workshop.

Chapter 11 opened the doors.

Cummins bought what it wanted.

Then somebody changed the colour of the fucking overalls.

Corporate Geology

This is why TCAP reads beyond whatever press release arrived this morning.

Corporate storytelling prefers the present tense because the present tense has no memory. Technology currently owned becomes part of the current owner’s innovation story, while the capital, risk, failure and engineering history underneath gradually disappear from view.

Cummins did not steal First Mode.

It did something much cleaner.

It bought the ending.

The beginning belonged to engineers trying to transform mine haulage. The middle involved hundreds of millions of dollars, a billion-dollar valuation, ambitious hydrogen plans and the expensive discovery that industrial transitions tend to behave differently once physics, infrastructure and capital markets are invited into the room.

Then came Chapter 11.

Cummins arrived with the purchase agreement.

First Mode had spent years learning how to extract value from a mine.

In the end, Cummins extracted the value from First Mode.

That is one hell of a fucking retrofit.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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