The Beam Dump Experiment (BDX) at Jefferson Laboratory (JLab) is an electron-beam thick-target experiment to search for Light Dark Matter (LDM) particles in the MeV-GeV mass range. BDX will exploit the high-intensity 10.6 GeV $e^-$ beam from CEBAF accelerator impinging on the beam dump of experimental Hall-A, collecting up to $10^{22}$ electrons-on-target (EOT) in a few years time. Any LDM particle produced by the interaction of the primary $e^-$ beam with the beam dump will be detected by measuring their scattering inside the BDX detector, an electromagnetic calorimeter surrounded by an hermetic veto system, which is to be installed in a dedicated underground facility, located 20 m downstream. Thanks to the large detection efficiency and background rejection capabilities, BDX will be able to explore a so-far unknown region in the LDM parameter space, improving current exclusion limits by one order of magnitude in case of a null observation.

In preparation to the full experiment, a small-scale version called BDX-MINI, has been built and operated at JLab with a lower energy beam. Despite the small interaction volume, the large accumulated charge of $2.2\times10^{21}$ EOT allowed for the BDX-MINI measurement to set competitive exclusion limits on the LDM parameters space, comparable to those reported by larger-scale efforts.