Day two on the floor of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC 2026) convention in Toronto brought a steady stream of executives, investors, and announcements. Among them was Kevin Keough, Chief Executive Officer of Oreterra Metals Corp. (TSXV: OTMC), who arrived with fresh financing news following a restructuring of the company formerly known as Romios Gold Resources Inc.
“We’ve been working like dogs for the last couple of weeks to raise money, and this is the culmination of a restructuring effort that we undertook at Oreterra,” Keough said during the interview. “It used to be Romios Gold Resources, of course. So that process has just concluded with the financing closing that we announced today.”
The financing moved far faster than expected. “Honestly, in my whole career, I’ve never been through an experience like that,” Keough said. “We set out on day one to raise $6 million. That was the objective. We thought it would take a month, maybe five weeks. Basically, we raised it in one day.”
Investor demand pushed the placement well beyond its initial target. “The phones were ringing off the hook—gong, gong, gong—this, that. It was crazy,” he said. “So I stopped marketing at the end of one day.” The final result, he explained, was significantly larger than originally planned. “Today’s announcement, which is $9.7 million, not six, resulted from having to increase the amount of the financing we were raising just because of the spillover interest.”
The financing follows a broader effort to reposition the company after Keough took the helm in June 2025. “I had known of Romios for many, many years, and I knew it had some great assets,” he said. “But there was one called Trek South, which I did not know about until late in 2024.”
The project ultimately drew him to the company. “I attempted to negotiate a deal for that asset, Trek South, for this other company, and they didn’t want it,” he said. “So I said, I thought that’s a bad move. So I’m going to jump over to Romios.”
Once in the role, Keough said the company moved through a series of changes. “We set about to fix Romios, because like many companies over the years, they accumulate issues,” he said. “We rolled the shares back. We refreshed the board of directors. We focused the company on Trek South.”
The rebranding to Oreterra, announced alongside the financing, reflects what Keough described as a reset. “We are what we are today, a totally new company in a way,” he said. “Very clean, no debt, lots of money as of today, and everything we need to really go to town on drilling Trek South in BC for the first time this summer.”
Preparations for the field program are already underway. “Right now, we’re preparing for the summer program,” he said. “That means organizing our helicopter service providers, camp providers, and finding our drillers. We’ve pretty much actually done all of that already.”
The company expects drilling to begin between mid-June and mid-July. “We have everything we need now to really do the exciting work,” Keough said.
For the immediate future, the company intends to keep its structure lean. “We have the team that we need right now,” he said. “We don’t need more directors at this scale of company.”
Keough said the central objective is clear. “We’ll focus on achieving a discovery. And that’s really what’s going to build the success of the company, is achieving a discovery at Trek South.”
His preference for early-stage exploration reflects the path he has followed throughout his career. “I used to work for De Beers Group, an Anglo American plc company, in Africa,” he said. “But I never liked that kind of small cog in that big machine kind of scene.”
Instead, he said he gravitated toward smaller ventures. “I’ve always been kind of entrepreneurial. I like the early stage. I like discovery because it’s exciting, right? And it’s not boring.”
Running small exploration companies, he added, requires flexibility. “As a professional, you wear a lot of hats in these little companies. You’ve got to do a lot of things. And I enjoy doing them.”
The ultimate goal, he said, remains unchanged. “It’s all about discovery. You’ve got to find something that could become a mine. Otherwise, you’re toast.”
At Trek South, the target is large and visible at surface, though its economic potential remains to be tested. “We’re putting the drills, we’re setting the drills up, in a massive body of rock that looks terrific,” Keough said. “It’s got metal on surface. It’s got lovely alteration.”
The unknown variables are those that will only be answered through drilling. “The question will become, what is the grade? And what are the intercept lengths?” he said. “That we can’t predict.”
For now, the company’s next chapter hinges on the upcoming drill campaign. “I do know that we’re going to be in the system from surface drilling,” Keough said. “The rest is up to the gods.”
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