Founders Metals Lays Out 2026 Antino Plan: $35M Spend, 100,000 Hectares, Two Open Anchor Zones

The management team at Founders Metals (TSX-V: FDR) is treating 2026 as a year of consolidation and scale-building at its flagship Antino gold project in Suriname. Speaking on The KE Report, CEO Colin Padgett framed the work as two parallel streams: move the two anchor zones — Upper Antino and Lower Antino — up the resource curve, while aggressively testing the broader land package that just expanded to roughly 100,000 hectares.

The headline drill number from a January 22 release at Lower Antino was 90 meters of 1.02 grams per tonne gold, with a one-meter interval running over 28 grams per tonne inside hole 41. Padgett characterized Lower Antino as lower grade than Upper Antino, but defined by width and consistency. Drilling has traced the zone over 1.9 kilometers of strike across multiple broad, intrusion-hosted shear zones, with mineralization starting at surface and historic auger work showing grade from the top down into the drilled footprint. The zone remains open in every direction, and the team sees room to grow it into what Padgett called a bulk-tonnage scenario — potentially low-strip ounces sitting alongside the higher-grade material at Upper Antino.

At Upper Antino, drilling is now through hole 48. The zone runs just under two kilometers of strike across three sub-zones of roughly 350 to 400 meters each, still open along strike and at depth. Higher-grade pieces continue to surface within the broader mineralized package, including historic grab samples in the 300-plus grams per tonne range and a recent drilling intercept of one meter at 28 grams per tonne that Padgett flagged as anomalous but illustrative of what the system can carry.

The 3.5-kilometer gap between Upper and Lower Antino is the most interesting untested stretch on the original concession. Padgett confirmed the company has done limited auger and prospecting there and is now layering in airborne geophysics, with the area on the formal exploration list for 2026. The regional auger geochemistry trend runs roughly four and a half kilometers south of Lower Antino toward the Boise target — a footprint Padgett acknowledged is too large to be a single open pit, but which supports the case that the mineralized system extends well beyond the current drilling.

The Antino project itself just grew to about 100,000 hectares. The expansion lands mostly to the south and southwest, layered onto what Padgett described as an unusually rich gold environment sitting in a greenstone belt just off the regional Guyanashire zone. The 36,000-hectare southern block came through a government application. Ownership splits across the package are not uniform: the original central 20,000 hectares sits under an option agreement with nanoresources that has Founders into 70%, with the option to reach 75%; the western and immediately southern ground falls under that same 70/30 structure; and the southernmost 10,000 hectares is a separate 10-year exploitation (mining license) concession owned 100% by Founders.

The capital position supports the plan. Padgett said the company holds around $55 million in cash against a monthly burn of $2.5–3 million, targeting $35–37 million of 2026 exploration spend. Upper and Lower Antino get the bulk of that — continued expansion drilling plus infill work, metallurgy, and geotechnical studies to move them along the development curve. The remainder funds an internal ranking system for greenfield drill targets.

The most concrete greenfield on the near-term calendar is a roughly 5-kilometer gold-in-auger anomaly in the northern part of the property — Padgett called it the largest single auger anomaly on the land package as a whole, bigger than the auger footprint that became Antino or Boise. Drilling there is planned to start early March 2026. Further north, a cluster of five or six separate shear zones has returned grab samples above 70 grams per tonne; they share the northwest trend seen at Upper Antino and are earmarked for drill testing later in March. Airborne surveys are running across roughly 1,000 square kilometers to feed the target pipeline through the year.

Padgett used the phrase "center of gravity" to describe the role of Upper and Lower Antino in the company's market valuation today, while describing the rest of the 100,000-hectare package as upside optionality — exploration potential the company plans to test methodically rather than chase shiny objects. He also pointed to peer interest from B2Gold and Goldfields as evidence of the district's scale potential, and claimed the combined land package hosts what he sees as north of 10 million ounces of potential — a target framed as the company's exploration ambition rather than a current resource.

For investors, the practical read is straightforward: 2026 is a year of two-tier execution at Antino. Tier one is moving the two anchor zones toward a global resource estimate, with both still open. Tier two is drill-testing a pipeline of regional targets on a land position that just roughly tripled in size, funded by a balance sheet that can carry roughly $20 million of optionality past this year's planned spend.