All posts by Ellen Kelleher

CSE Issuer Stories, Magazine

Idaho Champion Gold Mines: Carefully chosen gold project meets with early success in a great state for mining

From his offices in Toronto, Jonathan Buick sees the glitter of opportunity more than 2,000 miles away. On the outskirts of Elk City, Idaho, is Buick’s Xanadu, the Baner project, where he has just struck gold.

“We drilled 19 holes and we hit mineralization on every hole. The further to the north we got, the shallower it was and the better the grade,” says Buick of the 1,705 hectare exploration site.

If history is any guide, Baner’s potential is substantial to say the least. The Elk City area had numerous alluvial gold deposits dredged from the tributaries of the Clear Water River, which runs through it, between the 1850s and the late 1980s. And Crooked Creek, an area just north of the Baner project, yielded about 1.5 million alluvial ounces between 1880 and 1910.

Before moving to acquire Baner in November of 2016 and set up Idaho Champion Gold Mines Canada Inc. (CSE:ITKO) via a reverse takeover, Buick and his colleagues reviewed over 250 gold projects globally. The scope of the search was narrowed to places within an appropriate time zone and a favorable, English language legal jurisdiction. Idaho emerged as the best bet.

“We’re in a good environment. We have great relationships with various agencies and both the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. They’ve been very supportive. We’ve also made it a real focus to try to hire as many of the local people as we can,” says Buick. “We think it’s important for people to know that we’re here to be good stewards, but also to participate in the economy.”

Baner was purchased for US$500,000 from a local family, who had owned it since the 1890s. Last June, the first exploration of the site in modern times began.

Idaho Champion’s first drilling effort at Baner yielded a discovery zone which is about 500 meters north to south by 200 meters east to west. As much as 5,200 meters of core was drilled in 19 holes as part of this maiden campaign. And the results included an assay from a hole which intersected 5.76 grams of gold per tonne over 12.65 meters.

The company recently purchased six additional claims, which allows it to increase its strike length a further 2 kilometers.

“I believe that we have only scratched the surface on our first exploration program at Baner. We have made a new gold discovery through the drill bit and encountered great initial grades in the highly oxidized zones near the surface,” said Buick. “There was good continuity in the holes and our newly acquired Sally claims will provide us the opportunity to expand the strike length an additional 2 km to the north.”

Particularly exciting is that the drill results show highly oxidized zones near the surface, which improves the grades and makes the gold project “much more economically attractive.”

The results at Baner are being analyzed to plan the exploration program for this year’s field season. Baner remains Idaho Champion’s focus, but just a couple of counties away sits the Toronto company’s second gold project, Champagne, not far from Arco, which it staked in February of 2018.

While the property was in production from 1990 to 1993 as a heap leach gold mine, the previous owners never drilled below 100 meters. Idaho Champion’s geologists think there’s a much bigger system at the 10 square kilometer property that could be characterized by “Midas”-type deposits, consisting of high-grade gold and silver epithermal systems. “We think there’s a much bigger target and a much bigger system underneath,” says Buick. “Our goal in 2019 is to go ahead and do some grassroots exploration.”

Buick is a businessman who likes to have options as a hedge against uncertainty. So, last November, in a bid to diversify, Idaho Champion purchased 822 federal US cobalt mining claims in four blocks – Victory, Fairway, Twin Peaks and Ulysses – (about 6,871 hectares) in the Idaho Cobalt Belt, just outside of Salmon, Idaho, from American Cobalt Corp. for a price of 4 million shares. Buick reports that his investors supported the move.

“When we picked up the cobalt, I went out to each of my investors and said I’m going after some cobalt because I think it’s important to have exposure to the market and also to protect us should we not be successful at Baner,” notes Buick.

Despite a sharp price correction in 2018, growing demand for lithium-ion battery elements are predicted to sustain cobalt prices into the 2020s. And the Idaho Cobalt belt represents a top district for primary cobalt discoveries.

“The standalone cobalt groups are having a challenge finding the capital. But that’s a pause in the market,” says Buick. “Cobalt is going to continue to be a focus and a priority for the end user and capital will come back into the cobalt space. I’m very confident that cobalt will again shine.”

Field work including site surveys, ridge & spur soil sampling, rock sampling and geologic mapping kicked off at Idaho’s four cobalt ventures last November in a bid to gather information for a more robust effort this year.

Buick describes the four cobalt projects as “life jackets” offering protection on the Baner program. Thanks to the recent gold discovery, it looks likely that the cobalt projects will be used to support the work at Baner. “If we had been unsuccessful at making the discovery, we would look to change our focus and apply it to spending on the cobalt,” explains Buick. “We’re now in active conversations with third parties to allow for the monetization of the cobalt to allow us to expand on our gold focus.”

Under review now is whether to spin out the cobalt projects into a new company; to sell them and keep an interest; or bring in a partner. “Right now, we’re reviewing all of those options on the cobalt that will allow us to come back and focus on the gold,” Buick reports.

Having raised more than $400 million throughout his lengthy tenure in finance, Buick, who specializes in securing strategic capital in Korea and Japan as a managing director of Harp Capital and his own investment firm, enjoys a reputation as a money finder.

Before Idaho Champion started trading on the CSE at the end of September, Idaho raised more than US$3 million. It remains pre-revenue, however, and posted a net loss of C$2.36 million in the three months until the end of September, according to its latest regulatory filing statement.

But business is percolating, and Buick is confident that money can be found. “We have shareholders who said they would commit to the next source of funding when that is needed,” he says. He also points out that the company is not only engaged in conversations about its cobalt projects, but it’s also been approached by some larger gold companies about how they can participate in Baner.

Over the next two years, Buick intends to make the mission of Idaho Champion as public as he possibly can. “We’re a newly minted company on a project that hasn’t had modern exploration,” he concludes. “In our first program of exploration we made a discovery, but we’re an unknown story. It’s my job now to get out and get in front of the investor.”

This story was originally published at www.proactiveinvestors.com on March 8, 2019 and featured in the Public Entrepreneur magazine.

Learn more about Idaho Champions Gold Mine at http://www.idahochamp.com/.

CSE Issuer Stories, Magazine

Cannvas MedTech: Knowledge is king in the cannabis world too, says chief of Cannvas MedTech

“We really want to be the Google of cannabis data,” is how Chief Executive Officer Shawn Moniz sums up the mission of Cannvas MedTech (CSE:MTEC), a Toronto-based startup that specializes in educating the public about marijuana.

Having watched from the sidelines as Canadian companies sprung up to offer marijuana and its associated hardware, such as vaporizers, Moniz chose the less-travelled road of education when he launched his own cannabis company.

“The benefit of being a digital reference library of cannabis is that we can go into any country and people can learn about the different uses and a safe way of using cannabis if they so choose,” he says. “We are not dependent on any type of legislation or political maneuvering because it’s education, and education has no borders.”

Cannvas MedTech went public in July on the Canadian Securities Exchange as well as the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

“We wanted to carve a little niche for us,” Moniz says. “We found there were a whole bunch of people growing … and on the other side, everyone was getting into devices, vaporizers and oil vaporizers. But we thought we don’t really want to go into those two spaces.”

Moniz decided instead to offer straight talk about cannabis after spending five years building platforms for big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Bayer – which tended to put patients first in discussions about drugs.

He was concerned that the information being disseminated about cannabis reflected the interests of the licensed producers funding it. “We saw very biased information,” he says. “There was a need that no one was willing to plug.”

“So, I said hey, why don’t we just do what I did in the digital pharma space and bring that patient-centric approach to the cannabis industry,” he adds.

At the core of Cannvas MedTech’s business is its website Cannvas.Me, which provides online cannabis courses for free. Cannvas.Me offers the chance to read about cannabis’ medical applications in materials put out by physicians along with an online cannabis course, marijuana product reviews and a cannabis strain matcher that determines which variety is suitable for a specific ailment. The goal is to reach 100,000 users of the platform by the year’s close.

As more marijuana buyers explore Cannvas MedTech’s web site, they will provide data that will power the analytical side of Cannvas’s business, which has the lofty goal of providing the equivalent of census data for the cannabis industry.

Indeed, layered just below its education platform is Cannvas Data, which uses algorithms to pull apart the research on cannabis trends and find new data that might be of use.  Via its connections to other cannabis companies, academics, doctors, and governments as well as its own web site, Cannvas management is set to ramp up its data collection around the world.

As Cannvas MedTech’s business takes off, the idea is that its data will become more tailored to the marketing needs of cannabis companies and the research needs of governments, physicians and academics. Its management will be able to tell, for example, how the consumer tastes of a 25-year-old construction worker in Ontario compare to his or her counterpart in Australia. They might also be able to determine the extent to which patients at military bases are taking cannabis to address their cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“People educating themselves about cannabis is where we win. There’s a lack of awareness and a lack of education and the data is key to that,” notes Moniz.  

Partnerships are pivotal to the company’s ability to gather information. In one of its most prominent tie-ups to date, the company recently signed a revenue sharing agreement for Cannvas.me with the Vancouver-based e-commerce platform Namaste Technologies, which runs medical cannabis patient portal Namaste MD that has a reach extending to 20 countries and boasts a database of 1.5 million users.

Namaste has developed the country’s first cannabis telemedicine app, available on iPhone and Android devices, which allows patients to connect to doctors or nurse practitioners for consultations within minutes.

“The data is really going to set us apart within the industry. The Cannvas.me platform on a global basis will collect all of that data and feed it back into the industry,” reports Moniz.

Cannvas Connect, meanwhile, is the third branch of the business as it offers a secured network to allow for the sharing of Cannvas’s data with, say, Health Canada or the company’s other partners in academic and medical circles.

“Cannvas Data and Cannvas Connect, that’s where we have partnerships with academics and research facilities and we’re trying to do partnerships with the government in Canada,” points out Moniz. “We have analysts here providing insights and trends within the community and global markets.”

While 80% of the business is focused on Canada, the remainder is global and Moniz reports that Cannvas is already reaching out to clinics in Australia and Germany to introduce its software so Australians and Germans can have information on medical cannabis at the doctor’s office. Its management also recently travelled to Hong Kong and Japan and hosted presentations there. “In most parts of Asia, you can’t buy cannabis or legally obtain it,” says Moniz. “But playing on that education format opens up a lot of doors for us.”

The company’s goal is to have software in at least 100 clinics within the next year.

Keen to remain independent from the clutch of licensed marijuana producers who control the industry, Moniz and his management team opted to take Cannvas public instead of approaching companies for money. “We wanted to remain non-biased so the only way to do that is to make sure we got funding agnostic of any licensed producer,” he says.

Since its launch last September, Cannvas has built up a staff of 19 with offices in Vancouver and Toronto. As Cannvas widens its global reach by introducing its software in clinics around the world, it aims to become the international authority on the cannabis sector. Information will drive the company forward, along with the industry itself, Moniz believes.

“From a marketing perspective, it’s very important for the cannabis sector to know who their market is,” says Moniz. “Right now, everyone is just blasting out the same message to everyone whether you’re a medicinal or a recreational user. It’s one message fits all.”

This story was originally published at www.proactiveinvestors.com on August 31, 2018 and featured in The Public Entrepreneur magazine.

Learn more about Cannvas MedTech at https://www.cannvasmedtech.com/ and on the CSE website at https://thecse.com/en/listings/life-sciences/cannvas-medtech-inc.