Geomorphic AI CEO Mark Sumner on the Future of Resource Project Generation & Data Interpretation

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the co-founder of Geomorphic AI, Mr. Mark Sumner. Mark, how are you doing today?

Mark Sumner: I'm good, Gerardo. How are you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well. I am looking forward to learning more about Geomorphic AI. And I should say right off the bat, I'm biased. I'm a shareholder. And for those of you listening that are wondering, why is he a shareholder if he's looking forward to learning more? I am the last person in the world that would consider themselves tech-savvy. And so when you came to me and Mr. Jeff Phillips came to me and said, "Hey, we have this proprietary technology. We have this company. This is what it does." I said, "Look, it's not what I do. It's not what I specialize in." But I've known you Mark for some time now and Jeff's a friend and a mentor. And I said, "I'll take what you can give me. I'm happy to write a check just betting on the people." And much to my surprise in a good way, every other day I seem to get a news release from companies that have engaged Geomorphic AI.

So yesterday it was Headwater Gold. Two days ago it was T2 Metals. Last week it was Latin Metals. Before that it was Emperess Royalty, if I'm not mistaken. And so I really brought you on so you could explain to me and the audience what Geomorphic AI is, what it does, and then maybe we can get into some specific examples with some of those companies on what you've been able to do for them.

Mark Sumner: Yeah, definitely. And it's a lot. Like you said, I mean, it's been moving so quickly, everybody's rushing to keep up. Geomorphic, what we've built at Geomorphic is really an AI driven geoscience platform. And we built a platform that really is focused on reading entire geological records on a jurisdictional basis. And so we're going through and ticking through really on a country by country basis, ingesting as much data as we can possibly get our hands on. And that consists of public data as well as private data. And then utilizing that data to generate prospects. And so when we started at the heart of it, we were a prospect generator and we are a prospect generator. During that process, people in the network and you mentioned Jeff Phillips and his network is massive. We started coming into discussions with companies that are close to us who wanted to really take it for a spin and see how they might be able to leverage it into streamlining their exploration process and drill targeting and data acquisition and data processing.

And I'm kind of going on and on because there's a whole range of different things that we're doing for these companies. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of two facets. It's prospect generation, it's exploration and data support for other companies. And so far it's going really well. It's moving quicker than any of us ever imagined.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's get to some specific examples because I think that'll help me and it'll help the audience really understand more what the advantages are because look, let's start with Headwater Gold, right?

Mark Sumner: Sure.

Gerardo Del Real: That's the most recent news release. I've spoken with the team, the guys and gals over at Headwater. And what's been explained to me is that the speed and the accuracy that Geomorphic AI is able to compile, process, and then generate not just technical information, but entire breakdowns and overviews of mineral rights, jurisdiction, what was missed, what was had, what hasn't been discovered yet, where the potential is. And it does this from what I've been told from these companies in a ridiculously short amount of time. Let's start with Headwater. Can you walk me through what you've been able to do or what you're looking to do with Headwater Gold?

Mark Sumner: Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I'll just kick off because you know Headwater, pretty extraordinary prospect generator. I mean, I'll just mention that because Caleb seems to have a very unique skillset in getting large companies to write very large checks and do expanded large scale exploration programs on his properties. So I mean, I'll just point that out. I mean, they've been extraordinarily successful in bringing in large companies to work on their projects. So we're really excited to get with Headwater and get to work on a couple of their projects.

But I mean, it's a range of different things. I mean, one of the things that we excel at is integrating fragmented historical data, pulling together data sets that were generated by different teams at different points in time. And in some cases, both public and private geological surveys and private companies putting together data over multiple decades. Well, not only gathering that data, but also fusing that data to create a more coherent picture for the exploration process.

So really starting with that, taking fragmented data sets and pulling them together to give the team at Headwater a more clear and coherent picture. And then through that process, you're really accelerating the technical review. You're giving that geology team and that technical team a much sort of quicker path to decision making. Instead of having geos sifting through old PDFs, poorly scanned documents, we're actually able to pull that together and give them a much sort of quicker path to making decisions. So we'll start with that. There'll be a target generation process, which we've been doing for a number of different companies. And in that case, you're giving the technical team the ability to look at, in some cases, maybe some ideas that they hadn't considered because trying to sift through huge data sets and come up with exploration ideas and target generation can be daunting and we can give another view that can be done really quickly. And I think that's really helpful in a lot of cases.

So I mean, that's really kind of, in a nutshell, what we'll be doing is data work, helping them find new data. I don't know how that's going to work for Headwater. So far, we have 100% hit rate in finding data that the companies didn't have on their own projects.

Gerardo Del Real: 100% hit rate?

Mark Sumner: So far, yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: It's incredible.

Mark Sumner: So that's been really helpful. The system that we've built, we've got custom agents, custom tools that are really designed specifically for this process. And the more work that we do, particularly with high quality teams, because it is an iterative process where we deliver something and then we get feedback from exceptional teams like Caleb's team at Headwater and Sam's team at Kincora, and we get that feedback and it makes the process on our side better, it makes it smoother. And so we create this feedback loop between the technical team and the Geomorphic app, and it's been very effective.

Gerardo Del Real: You've been in the resource space and obviously have your own company that you quarterback, right?

Mark Sumner: Correct.

Gerardo Del Real: And so with Daura Gold. And so you understand the effort and the diligence and the time that it takes to compile this information in the traditional way. Can you give me the contrast between if… Let's take Empress Royalty, for example. You did some work with them and how long would it have taken what you provided for Empress if they did it the traditional way? And how long did it take for you to be able to compile that and deliver the information that they requested?

Mark Sumner: Yeah. Well, I don't want to give away too much because I think with Empress, we're early in the process and I think with Empress, it may be too soon to say this, but I think that we might be doing something very interesting that very few, if any, other companies are doing on the royalty side. So it's interesting applying the Geomorphic technology to the royalty generation deal origination process because we're able to compile that technical record, which is a huge part of that, right? I mean, you have to have sound technical basis to price a royalty and say, "We're going to spend 10 million bucks and acquire this royalty." So we're able to streamline that, but we're also able to pull together data on prospects that I think are, I'll just say much less obvious.

Look, manually pulling all that data together, how long is a piece of string? I mean, weeks, months, we're pulling data going back to the late 1800s on some projects, not just on the royalty side, but on other sides as well. So yeah, I think that pulling together the volume of data that we're able to assemble on a project by project basis, I mean, you're talking about huge teams taking months and months and months.

Gerardo Del Real: That's incredible. And just to be clear, I mean, obviously with Empress, that's a royalty company with Headwater Gold, that's a hybrid prospect generator, but it also has 100% owned projects.

Mark Sumner: Correct.

Gerardo Del Real: And clearly I saw a news release, I think a couple of weeks ago from a Noble Plains Uranium. So you're obviously working with companies in different commodities, right? It's not commodity exclusive. It's not business model exclusive. It's across the board from what it sounds like.

Mark Sumner: Yeah, it is. I mean, we're running in a lot of different directions. And so we're building custom tools and skills within our platform to handle all of those different functions, right? I mean, we talk about Latin Metals, which is a company that you know well, company that I know well also because we're working together on some other projects with Daura Gold, but that's a different type of exercise altogether because we're taking a data set which Keith and his team have assembled over a couple of decades across all of Argentina and on a province by province basis, we're creating a coherent series of targets which Latin will go out and evaluate for staking opportunities. And so that's a lot different than anything we're doing. And we're talking about copper projects and gold projects. And so there's a whole range of different things that are going to come out of that data set, but that's an interesting way for us to work with companies.

We've got a couple of other private data set type opportunities where we'll be generating prospects across multiple jurisdictions, sifting through an enormous amount of data that otherwise your technical team, especially in a junior, but even in a major company, it's pretty hard to allocate the sort of resources and analytical manpower to that sort of exercise where you look at six different countries and 60 years of data, how are you going to get through all of that? Well, we can streamline that process quite quickly. And so yeah, it's a whole range of different things. So we're going in a lot of different directions, but I think that's what makes it so exciting.

Gerardo Del Real: You're also staking projects for the company as well, correct? And offering them up for joint venture is my understanding. Can you speak to that? Because I was looking through the website and I mean, I'll be honest, some of the stuff that you're finding that you have available to joint venture or for earn in transactions is impressive. I mean, boulders that the origin's never been traced, 18 grams per tonne gold was the most recent thing that I saw, but there's a lot of those. How does that aspect of it work?

Mark Sumner: Yeah. I mean, and that one that you're mentioning just now is the Curie project in Sweden. It's a district scale opportunity that, again, I mean, it's a project area that has been explored by six, seven different teams over the course of probably 40 years. And pulling all that data together and in some cases scouring the depths of the SGU, finding data that was actually misfiled on the SGU side, we were able to correct some of their data filing on that particular project. That was a pretty heavy lift because there was a ton of data to pull together. But yeah, I mean, we really largely started in Scandinavia because it's so data rich. GTK in Finland and SGU in Sweden have extraordinary public data sets and as well as paid data offerings as well. And we started ingesting all of that data. And what's come out of that is really interesting prospects that in some cases drilled prospects that have largely been left behind. And it's pretty easy to trace that back to decisions made by different companies or even decisions made by the geological survey for not taking these things forward. But it's a data exercise, just accumulating data.

I mean, we've got one project in Finland, it's two drilled clusters, hasn't been tested below about 60, maybe about 80 meters vertical, but we found intercepts 8.6 meters at seven grams gold, five meters at 10 grams. And these are all above 60 meters vertical and open at depth. And we pulled together some, that's the Rita project. We pulled together a high resolution magnetic survey. We have a comprehensive surface geochemistry, boulder tracing, ice flow studies. And so we've taken a project that was really fragmented and looked at in probably five different seasons in five different areas and pulled it together as one project.

And I'll just mention, I think we've announced maybe six or seven projects. We've got 16 projects staked in an absolutely enormous land package across all of those projects. But I think it's fair to say that our most exciting projects haven't been disclosed yet. We have found some very, very interesting, very, very interesting projects in South America, in North America. I won't be more specific than that at this stage, and like you said, across a range of different commodities. I mean, we found some really exciting rare earth projects that we're staking right now. So yeah, it's pretty exciting.

Gerardo Del Real: You're a private company and yet you've attracted the attention and investment capital of groups like Endeavor Financial. We talked about Empress and Kincora and Headwater and Noble Plains Uranium and Latin Metals. I could go on and on, T2. Clearly, clearly there is a distinct technological advantage because groups like Endeavor Financial don't write a check just because they are friendly, right? There's a strategic reason that a group like that wants to sit at the table. What is it that separates Geomorphic AI from potentially other companies that are potentially wanting to duplicate the model? What is that advantage, that differentiator, that moat as Warren Buffet would call it?

Mark Sumner: Yeah. I mean, I think there are a few different things. I mean, in the first instance, and I won't cite any specifics, but in the first instance, I think on the AI side, we're not replacing geologists. I think that that has been kind of a proposition that's been put forward by a handful of companies. We're going to make discoveries. Our AI system is going to make discoveries. Our agents can analyze these targets and establish drill targets that are more effective than human in the loop. And I don't really, maybe that'll happen in the future with the way these things are progressing, but we don't really see it that way. I mean, the way that we see Geomorphic is an aid and a tool in the toolkit of extraordinary exploration teams.

Kincora is a good example because John Holliday and the former Newcrest team discovered Cadia, one of the biggest, if not, it may be the biggest gold mine in Australia. I can't really remember at this stage, but huge discoveries. And we're not replacing that, we're augmenting it. And so I think that's one reason that we're attracting the attention of some of these companies is because we're not telling them that we can do their job better than they can. We're trying to make them better at their job and make their job easier. And so I think that's one thing.

And then just look on the other side, we've built this for teams specifically. So we didn't build it in a vacuum and then hope that it worked out. I mean, we bootstrapped this thing. Sean and I funded this thing ourselves and offered it mostly to projects and teams that I was working on. And so like Stuart Mills, for example, at Daura Gold, we were able to offer him a tool that he could leverage to make his job easier, make it more efficient. And we can work so quickly.

So I don't know if that really answers your question. I'm rambling a little bit. And I think the biggest difference between what we're doing and maybe what other groups are doing is we're not replacing the human in the loop.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, look, it's an exciting time. The company's private. I'm looking forward to the day where the company goes public, but man, in the meantime, it's been really, really impressive as a shareholder here to watch the velocity on the last couple of months of the deals that you've made, the information you've been able to put together simultaneously, I should add, right? You're doing a lot of this at the same time, which is again, mind-blowing to me.

Mark, it's a fascinating time. It's a fascinating company in technology and really, really looking forward to seeing the company grow and advance and obviously wishing you all the success with it. Anything to add to that?

Mark Sumner: No, I think we've only been running really commercially since about February, right? I mean, even though it's been in the works for two years, but I think the only other thing to look out for, I mean, obviously plenty of mandates coming in the pipeline, but I think the only thing to look out for is more joint ventures. We've been assembling a big pipeline of projects and right now what we're focused on is getting some of those joint ventured out, which I think we will in the near future. And I think that's kind of the next exciting step and you'll see the company grow from there.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent stuff. Mark, always a pleasure. Fascinating stuff. Look forward to having you back on. Thank you so much.

Mark Sumner: I appreciate it, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: All right. Chat again soon. Cheers.

Mark Sumner: Thanks.

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