20 years ago during his PhD Stefano stumbled upon some Japanese castle moats of a very peculiar non-planar shape. His supervisor asked him: “why did the ancient samurai decide to build slopes in that way?” The quest to solve this riddle started there. The quest led to research the topological optimisation of slopes, i.e. looking to answer the question: what is the most efficient shape for a man made slope (cuttings, embankments, mine pitwalls)? We are surrounded by planar man-made slopes so that when an excavation is needed, we design it to be along a straight line by default. However, his research work on landslides meant Stefano was often looking at natural landscapes where most slopes are anything but planar. Several years of research led him to formulate the problem in a mathematical tractable way whereby the optimal shape is found as the one that maximises the resistance to landsliding and for any given geology and target excavation depth allows the maximum stable overall inclination to be safely excavated. The software OptimalSlope was born. Along the journey he met some young and brilliant students who are now part of the team: Andrea is co-founder and Dainius is Principal software engineer. The key pillars of the benefits brought by OptimalSlope to open pit mining are increased profitability, carbon footprint reduction and a more efficient, fast and automated design process.   .