Delta Gold

Distributed Quantum Research

God Morning Team.

When Delta Gold Technologies listed on London’s Aquis Growth Market back in December at 10p per share, the pitch was straightforward: back a world-class research team at the University of Toronto investigating whether nano-scale gold could solve quantum computing’s most intractable problem:

The stable, scalable qubit.

Then came the Penn State agreement. Then a £1.92 million raise at 35p.

The shares now trade for closind in on 50p a piece.

In the background, the shareholder register is telling a story of its own.

And now what looked like a binary bet on one research program is beginning to look like a deliberate portfolio model designed to derisk, diversify and (if it works) dominate the emerging quantum materials IP landscape.

As ever though, this is a risk play to be invested with risk capital.*

Not advice*

Purebond and the GMET Playbook

Buried in Delta Gold’s 17 February fundraising announcement was a single line worth examining closely.

The raise welcomed Purebond Ltd to the shareholder register — described as a ‘strategic’ subscriber, without further elaboration.

For most readers, it passed without comment.

Purebond was an early investor in what was then Golden and is now Guardian Metal Resources, a tungsten-focused critical minerals company whose CEO and several key backers have since turned up on Delta’s own register.

Guardian Metal has returned approximately 20x for those who got in early. The people who backed it then are backing Delta Gold now.

This matters for two reasons.

First, it tells you something about the quality of the network around Delta Gold. These are not casual retail punters chasing a trend. They are sophisticated investors with a track record of identifying and backing early-stage resource and technology companies before the wider market catches on — and who have now collectively decided that Delta Gold is the next vehicle worth backing at this stage.

Second, it suggests that the 35p raise — already a 250% premium to the IPO price — was not the ceiling anyone in that room was thinking about.

The warrant structure tells the same story: exercise price of 50p, with an acceleration trigger if the share price exceeds 70p for ten consecutive trading days.

The people writing cheques at 35p are pricing in multiples from here.

A Portfolio Approach

The original framing of Delta Gold — and the one that dominated early coverage including my own original view — was essentially binary. Either the University of Toronto team discovers something patentable with nano-gold, or they don’t.

What Michael Jones is actually building is a distributed quantum research portfolio — a model in which Delta funds multiple simultaneous research programs across leading global institutions, each investigating gold-based and related quantum materials from a different angle, with Delta holding the exclusive IP rights across all of them.

The Penn State agreement, signed in February 2026, makes this explicit.

Penn State’s quantum gold research was conducted entirely independently of Toronto — same material, but with different hypotheses and different methodologies. Rather than viewing this as competition or redundancy, Delta moved quickly to bring both institutions under one commercial roof.

The result is that two of the world’s top materials science universities are now collaborating on gold-based quantum research, with Delta owning the IP from both programs.

Jones was candid about the direction of travel in a recent interview:

‘Whether we have four or five or seven universities in the world working together — let’s see what the academics come up with.’

This is a fundamentally different risk profile from the original pitch.

You are now betting (and yes, it remains a bet) that across multiple world-class institutions, each approaching the same underlying problem from different directions, something of value emerges.

Why the Portfolio Model Works in Quantum

The quantum computing landscape in 2026 is characterised by one fact: nobody knows which fundamental physics approach will win.

IBM has built its roadmap around superconducting qubits. Microsoft is betting on topological qubits. IonQ and others are pursuing trapped ions. Google achieved its ‘quantum supremacy’ milestone in 2019 and has been iterating on superconducting architectures ever since.

Each approach has attracted billions in investment and each has a dedicated industrial ecosystem built around it.

And each, without exception, still faces the same fundamental challenge: error rates that make commercial application elusive, and coherence times measured in fractions of a second.

The irony is that the very scale of these investments has created a kind of institutional lock-in. Companies that have spent five years and a billion dollars down a particular technological corridor cannot easily pivot. Their product roadmaps, their manufacturing partnerships, their developer ecosystems — all of it is path-dependent.

Delta Gold has none of that baggage.

Starting at the basic physics level, with no prior commitment to any particular architecture, Delta is free to follow the science wherever it leads.

And the science, right now, is pointing somewhere interesting.

Penn State’s Ken Knappenberger has identified 19 distinct spin-polarised states in gold nanoclusters and achieved spin polarisation of up to 40% — competitive with leading two-dimensional quantum materials.

Crucially, unlike trapped ions, which exist as dilute gases and are extraordinarily difficult to scale, gold clusters can be synthesised in large quantities.

The Toronto and Penn State programs are now in active collaboration. Two independent lines of evidence, converging on the same material.

Meanwhile, Stanford has announced room-temperature quantum entanglement using novel nanoscale materials. The illusion that extreme cooling is a permanent requirement of quantum computing is being dismantled.

IP Play: Don’t Build the Computer

Delta Gold’s business model also deserves to be restated.

It is not trying to build a quantum computer.

The team is building a portfolio of intellectual property that the companies building quantum computers will need to license.

The potential customer list — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google — represents combined market capitalisations measured in the trillions. Their collective quantum R&D spending is measured in the billions annually.

Delta’s current enterprise value is, even after the rise, approximately two potatoes and a carrot.

The asymmetry is not subtle.

Jones made the strategic logic explicit in his interview, describing what he calls ‘fire insurance’:

If you are spending $3,000,000,000 a year down a particular technological hallway, and a small team at a world-class university produces results that could either threaten your approach or improve it, the cost of acquiring or licensing that IP is trivial.

The cost of not doing so is potentially existential.

‘We don’t have to be all the way right,’ Jones said. ‘We just have to be dangerously close.’

There is also the Oxford Ionics precedent, which Jones cited directly. Oxford Ionics began as a three-year research project at Oxford University. The output wasn’t a working quantum computer — it was a tool to measure properties of qubits.

The company sold for a billions.

Delta only needs to generate IP that sits close enough to the critical path of quantum computing development that the major players would rather buy than build around it.

Geopolitical Tailwinds

Another dimension of the Delta Gold story that has also received insufficient attention is the geopolitical one.

Approximately 35% of global quantum computing investment is currently flowing through China. The race to achieve practical quantum computing is not merely a commercial competition — it has profound implications for cryptography, military intelligence, financial infrastructure and national security.

Delta Gold’s research programs are anchored in the UK, Canada and the United States — the core of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

Jones has spoken explicitly about the importance of keeping this IP within allied nations, and the structure of his university partnerships — Toronto, Penn State and whatever institutions follow — reflects that orientation.

In an environment of rising technology nationalism and tightening export controls, the provenance of quantum IP is increasingly a feature, not just a footnote.

Western governments and defence primes are actively looking for quantum research to back. Delta Gold’s portfolio could become strategically valuable to parties beyond the commercial tech sector.

Milestones to Watch in 2026

The company’s stated timeline provides clear markers for assessing progress:

Mid-2026: First provisional patent filing from the Toronto program. This is the single most important near-term catalyst. A filing would signal that the research team believes they have discovered something novel and protectable — the first concrete evidence that the science is delivering.

Late 2026: The first tranche of founder shares (33%) becomes eligible for release from escrow. Watch trading volumes and price action around this window for any selling pressure. Zero/limited selling would be a very good sign.

Throughout 2026: Additional university partnership announcements. Given Jones’s comments about Oxford and the pace at which the centre of excellence concept is developing, further agreements before year-end seem plausible.

2027: Targeted full patent filings and initial identification of potential licensees.

A Word on Risk

This is still a pre-revenue, pre-patent, early-stage research company. The risks have not disappeared simply because the story has developed.

This is somewhere between a growth stock and a moonshot. You want it in your portfolio, but it needs to be an investment made with risk capital.

Again not advice.

But consider your own risk tolerance before investing.

The Bottom Line

A few months ago, Delta Gold was a single-program bet on one university team investigating a speculative hypothesis.

Today, it;s a portfolio model, backed by investors with a demonstrable track record, building an exclusive IP position across multiple world-class institutions at the precise moment when the quantum computing field is beginning to crack open in unexpected directions.

The market cap remains tiny relative to the scale of the opportunity it is pursuing. The shareholder register now includes people who have done this before and made 20x doing it.

None of that guarantees anything. The house doesn’t always win just because the right people are at the table.

But it does mean you’re in the right casino.