Standard Uranium (STND.V) figured out how to make others pay them to work their own site

Standard Uranium (STND.V), a few years back, was all in on the Davidson River project.

Uranium was hot and CEO Jon Bey had eyeballed a geo in Sean Hillacre who was young, accomplished during his time with NexGen Energy (NXE.T), and knew the ground as well as anyone. Bey’s pitch was simple; be a bigger part of a smaller team on a chunk of ground that the market had missed.

Bey made the case he’d work harder than anyone in the C-suite, if Hillacre would do the same on the tundra.

And then they went all in on an early drill program that didn’t pay off. The ground was uneven. The drills froze. It all went wrong.

But Bey and Hillacre didn’t quit. Instead, as I reported here over several years, they retooled, re-capitalized, and changed the model.

Instead of putting everything into one hole, they spread their bets, acquired new projects, used their tech knowledge to find good ground and their networks to find partners who would pay them for the right to work it.

Forward a couple of years now and Standard is no longer a dice roll. Now it’s a prospect generator with a reputation for two things:

The best exploration crew in the area among juniors
The hardest working CEO, period

That’s kept the investors investing long enough to give management time to move the monthly burn to as low as it can reasonably roll, while bringing in partners who’re paying with cash, shares, and work done – with enough of the above value to match Standard’s market cap.

WHAT NEXT?

That’s easy. Drill the fuck out of Davidson River.

Core Play

Early-stage uranium explorer in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin, with flagship Davidson River project and multiple optioned-out or 100%-held secondary projects.
Business model leans toward joint ventures and operator fee revenue rather than trying to develop all properties alone—capital-light where possible.
Increasing reputation of their crew allows them to consult with other companies and get paid to do the ground work.

What’s Working

Multiple Revenue Streams via Option Deals:
- Signed JV/option agreements with Aero, ATCO, and Mamba. These paid the bills while reducing dilution, and brought in:
  - Cash + shares
  - 10–12% operator fees on exploration spend (over $223K earned in 9 months)
  - Exploration gets done without STND footing the full bill
Davidson River Advances: Moving toward 90% ownership (currently under option); company has paid most of the staged payments and plans final $350K in 2025.
Lean Overhead: Consulting-heavy structure allows for flexible cost base and targeted spend.
Capable of Raising Money: Closed three tranches of private placements in late 2024/early 2025 totaling ~$917K. Modest but functional, and without selling too much stock cheap.
Optioned projects (e.g., Sun Dog, Canary) convert dormant assets into cash, shares, or exploration value.

READ Skyharbour Resources (SYH.V) an Athabasca Basin Uranium gem in the midst of an aggressive drill campaign

What’s The Risk?

No Discovery Yet: No proven resource, no economic assessment. This is still a “pre-discovery” spec play, but this summer season they’re looking to get out there and change that.
Small Treasury: Ended January with just $180K cash but partners pay the geo crew to work, which runs the burn down significantly while they raise cash.
Some Option Deals Cancelled: Both Mamba (Canary) and ATCO (Atlantic) ran out of dough and dropped out in late 2024/early 2025, but those properties are now back on the books for STND.
Heavy Warrant Overhang: 10.3 million warrants, most at $0.15–$0.45. If the stock rallies, dilution hits but cash in the door would be nice.

Macro Context

Uranium sentiment is bullish: Sprott’s buying, geopolitical situations are reshuffling, climate urgency sets nuclear energy up for a push. All bullish for junior names with exposure, and a rep for doing the work instead of dog paddling.
Athabasca Basin remains one of the few global districts where high-grade discoveries can be made and rewarded, and Davidson River isn’t a ‘me too’ play. It’s new ground, relative to the pack.
Risk appetite returning to selective juniors—STND’s low valuation could benefit if it can land a partner on Davidson or hit on drill results.

The Setup

Market is ignoring STND right now, likely due to:
No drill catalysts in 2024
Perception of balance sheet stress
And the big one: Junior sector fatigue
Valuation is tiny vs optionality: All-in, it’s a $3M market cap company with:
A flagship asset in a tier-1 district
JV cashflow keeping the lights on
Unpartnered properties ripe for future deals
Full ownership of some returned projects that they were paid to work last year

READ Uranium market revival: Have we reached a turning point in nuclear energy stocks?

Investment Thesis

Standard Uranium is a classic optionality bet on discovery and uranium sentiment.
If uranium heats up again this summer and exploration funding flows back in, this company has:

Several properties ready to go,
A history of solid JV execution,
Incoming cash and stock
And enough exposure to catch a tailwind.

Here’s my thinking:

Jon Bey has put more miles on his frequent flyer card than anyone I know of.

They’re going to drill, period. They drilled last year on several properties, and they convinced others to pay them to do it. But this time, they’re going to drill Davidson.

That’s the property they think has the potential to max out this ticker.

Here’s how they describe it:

Davidson River is highly prospective for basement-hosted uranium deposits due to its location along trend from recent high-grade uranium discoveries. However, owing to the large project size with multiple targets, it remains broadly undertested by drilling. Recent intersections of wide, structurally deformed and strongly altered shear zones provide significant confidence in the exploration model and future success is expected.

This isn’t just any plot of land. This is Davidson River. $STND $STND.V $STTDF #Uranium pic.twitter.com/enmRFIRUfe

— Standard Uranium (@StandardUranium) March 12, 2025

What makes me think they can get it done? Two things.

NEW FRIENDS: They’ve brought on Jasper Management and Advisory Corp to run the admin and financing end of the business, which gives them advisor access to Gord Keep, a legend in the resource space, and Fort Capital’s Andrew Judson.
NEW TECH: A company called Fleet Space has technology that can help STND survey their project despite uneven rock cover. And Fleet Space are so into it, they put a sizeable investment into the company.

To wit;

In partnership with Fleet Space, the company will undertake three ExoSphere multiphysics survey grids across the Warrior, Bronco and Thunderbird conductors on the project. The company and Axiom Exploration Group Ltd. will mobilize to deploy the survey grids in late May [read: now], and the survey is anticipated to take approximately 35 days to complete.

The multiphysics surveys will collect and integrate ANT, HVSR and ground gravity data sets covering highly prospective areas along three of the four main structural corridors on the project. The surveys will provide critical targeting layers in the form of 3-D ANT-HVSR shear velocity models and custom inversion models for subsurface density, leveraging both passive seismic and ground gravity data sets as inputs.

Using Fleet Space’s proprietary cover depth analysis from the ANT data in combination with the ground gravity data, Fleet Space will compute and provide a cover-corrected gravity data set, which will significantly upgrade target areas at Davidson River through imaging of density anomalies in the basement rock. These surveys will be the first of their kind in the SW Athabasca basin uranium district and marks a significant step toward discovery on the project.

TL/DR; Last time around the ground cover made it hard to nail down targets. This time around, Fleet Space will lessen that problem, and STND can finally get a good looka t what lies beneath. And with that, they’ll pick drill targets ASAP.

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That’s… different. Others have steered clear of the SW Athabasca because of this uneven density problem, so if you figure there’s a decent likelihood that the festooning of uranium anomalies in the greater region might show up on both sides of the basin, this is a high reward dice roll that could open up a new sub-region.

One way or another, Standard’s gonna know what it has real soon, and that corrects the one thing that has kept that company toiling away over the last few yesars rather than advancing hard.

It’s advancement time.

Guys, I like a crew who show their work, believe in the rock, and look for flow-through money rather than country club money.

They’re not a client, but I want Standard to win because they’ve done things right and we should all reward that sort of behaviour.

— Chris Parry

FULL DISCLOSURE: Not a client, but they have been in the past, and I’ve bought and sold the stock previously. Might be time to go again.