Founders Metals

Great. Thanks everybody. It’s great to be here again. This is a third Mining Forum for me and here with Founders Metals. Happy to be here for another year and get to go over some of the updates and what’s been going on, particularly over the last 12 months for Founders. So for those of you not aware, the Antino Gold Project, we’re located in Suriname. We’ve been exploring on the ground there, growing a land package to what we consider a district scale, 1,000 square kilometers, and we’ve made a lot of discoveries. And so going through this presentation, I really wanna focus on that discovery scale and really the growth opportunities that we see both for our advanced targets and the earliest stage exploration stuff.

So diving into first really what’s happened over the last 12 months here. So the image on the left is the concession this time last year, 200 square kilometers of exploitation concessions in Suriname. That’s now grown to 1,000 square kilometers, and so that’s really the scale piece. What we came to understand over the last two or three years of exploration drilling and testing things within that original concession area was that we were in an area where it’s the right rocks. We have a gold system that spans an enormous scale. And so adding to that land package became top priority for us, and we’ve been able to deliver that over the course of the last 12 months.

In the same time period, we had Gold Fields come in for an initial investment of $50 million Canadian last fall in November. Since February, we’ve had the land package that you see on the right-hand side. Happy to be included in the GDXJ and then made a series of different discoveries on both the new ground that we’ve acquired, so really validating the acquisition costs and getting that new package together, but then also some pretty impressive discoveries at depth at Upper Antino in our more advanced target area. Lastly, and most recently, we consolidated. We were in a 70-30 joint venture partnership with a local original optionor or owner of the concession, and we’ve recently bought out that 30% for a now 100% interest in the entire Antino project, and no royalties associated with any of that ground, which I was very happy to put together.

Quick corporate snapshot. Today, post-consolidation, we’re looking at 144 million shares outstanding. No warrants. Fully diluted, we’re 150 million shares out. We’ve been very fortunate to add a number of very good long-term institutional investors to the roster recently, and coverage as well has picked up with the most recent coverage coming out of National Bank, and we expect to see a little bit more on that end later this year. Working capital, $80 million in the bank gives us quite a lot of runway to do ongoing drilling this year, where we’ve increased from what was initially a target of around 70,000 meters drilled to upwards of just over 80,000 is where we expect to end this year. And next year, I expect we have a similar or likely a considerably larger program with some of the new discoveries and things that we’ve made.

I won’t belabor this one. Atlantic Ocean’s a little narrower than it should be, but it’s still an important slide, I think, for context as to why I think a lot of people are really interested in the Guyana Shield right now, and that’s that West African geologic analog. I think everyone’s familiar with the gold discoveries in the Caribbean and all the activity there, and it’s been really nice over the last three or four years to see interest pick up in the Guyana Shield. Both in Guyana and in Suriname, we’ve seen a lot of new juniors coming in. There’s been some M&A activity. It’s become a really exciting and quite hot spot to be working and a lot of, I think, new big deposits are gonna come out of this region over the next many years.

Zooming into Suriname itself, Suriname has been a great place to work. We’ve been very effective over the last three and a half years here. But it does have that long history of mining that helps with just infrastructure and all of those pieces on the ground that make an exploration project able to run efficiently. The big ones are Newmont and Sijens, Marian and Rosebel projects respectively. Rosebel itself has been in operation for over 20 years and there’s that very long history that bodes well, I think, for future development of a project like ours ultimately. The other big one is oil and gas discovery off the coast. Like its neighbor Guyana, Suriname has the benefit of those same oil fields offshore. That leads to gas production in 2028 and the revenue that comes along with it, and ultimately the infrastructure that also comes along there.

So you can see on the map here we’ve a pretty big package. Our claim to fame with that is that we have the largest uninterrupted exploration, or contiguous land package in the Guyana Shield for an exploration company out there. And just relative to the scale of the country itself, it’s become a pretty big box on the map.

So zooming in here, sometimes I think I could just leave this slide up and just start reading through some of the grades that we’ve intercepted with diamond drilling over some of these new targets and things that have developed over the last couple of years, and that would tell enough of the story. But really, you see the sort of grades, the 78 meters of 2.38 at Boise, 21 meters of 2, Da Vinci’s 36 at 2.2, and then some really high-grade stuff from Upper Antino, like the 15.5 meters of 30 and most recently 28 meters of 14 grams. These are the sorts of numbers that have driven us to want to acquire more ground and put together the package we have. We do exist in a very target-rich environment, and that’s a great spot to be as an exploration company. But we’ve got two styles of mineralization predominantly. So we’re dealing with those high-grade shear zone-hosted systems and then also these bulk tonnage intrusion-hosted mineralization, where we see that opportunity for building out ounces through potential low strip, from surface oxide-type mineralization.

With a land package like this, it’s how do you explore all of it? We really take a two-part approach to this. Focus about half of our resources on infill expansion type drilling at the more advanced targets, in this case, Upper and Lower Antino, which are our current center of gravity. And then the other half of our resources are going typically into that greenfields, grassroots type exploration that really starts with some very first order work. So I’m gonna go through just the surface exploration and the pipeline at the early stage, and then I’ll get back into the more advanced targets and what those look like.

With the surface exploration, I get the question all the time now, “How do you explore 1,000 square kilometers?” And systematically and with really large datasets is the only way to approach it. So we collect things. I think one of the most important ones is LIDAR, understanding what the surface looks like underneath the tree cover in the jungle. After that, it’s auger sampling. And we have a pretty ambitious auger sampling program underway right now where we’re about 11,000, 12,000 samples into what will ultimately be likely 30,000 plus to cover the entirety of that 1,000 square kilometer package. We’re doing those at 400 meter line spacing, 50 meters between sample, and that gives us the resolution that, if we’re out there looking for these first order, stub your toe on it type deposits, that we’re gonna see those in that.

And I think we already have had a number of anomalies that have come out of the auger work, come out of the geophysics, and come out of that LIDAR work that it’s pointing us in the right direction and has led to the Antino North numbers you can see at the top there, the Antino Northeast discovery, and then most recently that 27 meters of 20 from very close to Upper Antino came out of following up on this sort of work. So this is that pipeline generation. It’s the earliest stage piece, and you’re building up towards things that you then take a drill to and hopefully hit some big new stuff.

Moving into the more advanced targets. Upper Antino is really our center of gravity today. And we have, over the course of the last three and a half years, been pretty systematically stepping out, first the long strike. We’ve built this to now 2.5 kilometers of strike extent for the mineralized system. We really see that potentially continuing to grow, and we’re about 750 meters of cross strike in the main area. To depth, drilling has only recently started extending below the 300 meter level, and it’s been quite exciting some of the stuff that we’ve been hitting, including that 27 to 20, which was our most recent press release here in August, on the Upper Antino area.

The other big one is that these are the shear zone hosted vein systems, and they’re associated with these big northwest trending structures. And that west zone, it winds up being another one of these. So I don’t have a line on there, but the old concession boundary would have split right between the two, the Frojo zone area and this west zone. And so that’s a brand new thing in ground that’s only been picked up in the last several months. And 53 meters of 1.2 was the discovery hole, which we were excited about, but it took the market a little while to realize that that’s pretty impressive for an orogenic system. But the 27 of 20 that came after really had people start paying attention to this new zone that’s building out of the Upper Antino area.

Putting a cross-section through all of that, what does it look like? This is where we’re at. We see this as future open pit mining, with eventual underground from that open pit. Working on continuing to extend that Frojo zone to depth with some longer drill holes there. And then we’ll have drills in another week or so back on the west zone. I really like this figure though, or this image, because it shows all of the opportunity in between these areas. And that’s that northwest trending structures. I think in the earliest days, we probably thought that there was a hanging wall footwall contact at Frojo or that part of it. And in the footwall, there maybe wasn’t a whole lot out there to the west. So we’ve been very happily surprised when we started getting some really great surface exploration results. And then now the drilling results show that there is a much bigger system here and a lot of drilling work to be done to start filling that in and seeing what this total picture looks like just within the Upper Antino camp area.

Quick zoom in just to talk about some of the deepest stuff and go through some of the Frojo zone grades. Mineralization starts from surface here. We see excellent continuity through the oxide zone into the fresh rock. And in some of the shallowest work, 15.5 meters of 30 grams was from 63 meters down. And then that most recent hit, the 28 of 14 at the bottom of this figure here is upwards of 430 meters all down hole. And we’re right now continuing to build out, in particular, that down part of the structure, the down dip of the main shear. And we see a lot of opportunity for that to continue to grow.

A big part of it too, and we’ve had this additional push into depth and getting more holes into the stuff below 300 meters, is that we see these other Guyana Shield gold deposits. I think it’s a pretty common theme for orogenic deposits as a whole. Testing down to seven, eight hundred. It’s about a 1,000-meter average for Guyana Shield deposits. And so we want to get some holes down there as well and understand what the ounces at depth really look like and start adding that to the broader picture.

Moving to the next piece of the advanced targets. We really see Lower Antino as an example of the intrusion-hosted deposits. The bulk tonnage from surface, low strip type scenario is what we’re targeting. We’ve had excellent continuity in between holes, almost 2 kilometers of strike extent right now with these multiple zones that are 15 to 90 meters wide. And we see a lot of 50, 60, 80, 90 meters of a gram. And then in places where we’re not hitting that gram level material, there’s a good example there, 240 meters of almost 0.3. So you’re getting that grade in the background as well. So this is something that we’re putting more work into, to both continue to expand and look for the edges of it, but to do some info work on as well and ultimately build into initial resource that we see it fitting very well alongside the Upper Antino high-grade mineralization.

And so just to quickly cover some of the emerging targets, because there’s not enough time to go through the details of every single one. But Antino North and Antino Northeast are things that we just started drilling this year, some of that new ground that’s been acquired. In the north, we are following up on prospecting work, some excellent grab samples, and then some auger anomaly work that came out of the very earliest auger work on the new ground. First hole there was 25 meters of almost 3 grams. And we’ve had a few other hits that similarly demonstrated that there’s this shear zone hosted mineralization that’s very, very promising going forward. We’ll have a drill back there doing some follow-up work later this fall.

Antino Northeast is a different piece to Antino North. We have 1,200 meters of strike now. We started out with around a 5,000-meter drill program that’s certainly expanded, and the follow-up drilling to the discovery hole there, that 58 meters 1, we expect to have out later or earlier this fall as well. And we expect we’ll continue doing more work in that area. And that was following up on one of the largest auger anomalies on the entire property, that we got from some of the historic work that came along with that acquisition.

Maria Giralda is a target that last year we drilled 22 meters of almost 12 grams per ton. We did some follow-up work with a drill hole about 80 meters step back, and we couldn’t replicate that. The original hit was in oxide. And so instead of moving on, we really wanna understand that and understand whether it’s a geometry piece, what’s going on there? Because you don’t find 22 meters of 12 in isolation typically. So we went back with deep auger work, and these are augers that go down 30 meters into that oxide and over a pretty tightly spaced grid. We were able to define a pretty clear ore shoot in geometry that we can now go back with a diamond drill rig and with some relatively shallow holes, we can start testing some different geometries that we wouldn’t really have been looking for previously and see if that’s something that turns into something a lot bigger. Certainly, the grades that have come out of that auger work, we see excellent grade continuity within that 30-meter horizon. And now we wanna see, can we test that down to the contact with the fresh rock and understand whether it turns into something much, much bigger.

And then lastly, on the exploration target piece, similar approach, I think, is what we wind up following with the Da Vinci and Van Gogh targets. So Van Gogh is one of the best first drill holes we’ve ever put onto a target, 28 meters of 7, and another 72 meters of 2.5 grams that came out of a follow-up drill hole to that one. But another one where we need to put a little bit more work into. And that’s been the theme. We’ve developed these targets. Many of them have around 2,000 meters into them and certainly deserve considerably more work. And we’ll be doing that over the course of the fall.

So this is a bit of a fun one. One of the things that’s come up for us is the scale of the property. So it’s 55 kilometers north to south, and so we’ve overlaid it on the Abitibi Greenstone Belt, and it’s really just to demonstrate the opportunity. I’m not waving my arms to say that we have 70 million ounces by any stretch, but just from a scale standpoint, it’s really impressive to understand these Greenstone Belts where they have this sort of prospectivity, can over a long period of time turn into these multi-decade mining opportunities or generational assets for people. And you can find an awful lot of gold within a Greenstone Belt or land package of the scale that Antino is today.

And just ’cause I really like to show some of the high grade off, over 2026 of the ten top holes that have come out of the Guyana Shield, Antino ranks four of them in that ten. And really our most recent intercepts have been the two best holes of the 2026 period. So I’m hoping, and we’ve got a lot of drilling ongoing and lots of results to come, that we’ll see more added to this table here coming forward in the fall.

And then lastly, because I think it’s a really important message for people to understand about these deposit types, orogenic gold systems are usually a series of deposits along structures. And once you have that system figured out, often more gold gets found. And great examples are the two mines that are in Suriname. Started with sub 2 million ounce resources initially, and then over the period of their mine life, which in both cases for Marian and Rosebel extends considerably from where we are today, have grown enormously. In the case of Rosebel, from 1.2 to over 12 million ounces of total production and reserves inventory right now.

Just to wrap things up, really recent successes went over a lot of that. We’ve made a lot of discoveries. We’ve had Gold Fields increase their ownership to 99 for a total of around $100 million US investment at this point in the project. And then we have coming up, I’d say, a lot of drill results from the drilling, and I would expect the pace to be similar to what we’ve seen so far, and that’s pretty typically better than one press release a month that’s covering the drill results and keeping people up to speed on what’s coming out with the drill bit. We have a little bit more consolidation work I suspect we’ll do over the coming months. And then really, I think it’s follow along for the new discovery work that we see come out of the early-stage exploration pipeline. I’ll leave it there and invite any questions if there’s time.

We are unfortunately out of time, but, Colin, that was a great update. Thank you so much.

Thanks.