Delta Gold

Patents bring the alpha

Good Morning Team.

In high risk assets, Delta (the measure of how much an option’s price changes relative to a £1 move in the underlying stock) is highly volatile and unpredictable because sudden price swings cause the metric to shift violently.

As we all know in small caps, sudden price swings are a common phenomenon.

In this space, it means what may appear to be a relatively low risk option can instantly turn into a massive directional gamble, exposing you to rapid, extreme losses

Or exponential gains.

We’re seeking the former here.

Because it’s been a busy few months for Delta Gold.

When I first wrote about Delta Gold in February, the shares were trading at 26p — already a 160% gain from the 10p IPO price in December 2025.

The pitch was simple but speculative: a micro-cap company with a research agreement at the University of Toronto, investigating whether nano-scale gold could solve quantum computing’s most stubborn problem — the stable, scalable qubit.

A lot has happened since then. Let’s bring you up to speed.

The Investment Case — For Those Just Joining

Delta Gold Technologies is a tech start-up with a simple but potentially powerful business model: fund cutting-edge quantum computing research at world-class universities, own the resulting intellectual property, and license it to the companies — Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon — that are spending billions trying to build the quantum computers of the future.

They are not trying to build a quantum computer themselves. This is really important - they don’t have the capital to do this and shouldn’t try. You can’t win that way.

They’re trying to own the patents that the people building quantum computers will need to license.

McKinsey estimates quantum computing could generate $72 billion in economic value by 2035. The US government alone is now committing billions to the sector. The tech giants have entire divisions dedicated to cracking the qubit problem.

Delta Gold’s current market cap, even after substantial share price appreciation, remains tiny relative to that opportunity.

That asymmetry is the core of the investment case.

The fundamental science underpinning Delta’s work comes from research published by Penn State’s Professor Kenneth Knappenberger (what a name!), who identified 19 distinct spin-polarised states in gold nanoclusters and achieved spin polarisation of up to 40% — competitive with leading two-dimensional quantum materials.

Unlike trapped ions, the current gold standard for quantum systems, gold clusters can be synthesised in large quantities.

That scalability is the key distinction between this tech and failed attempts elsewhere.

Delta’s founder and CEO Michael Jones — a professional engineer and serial entrepreneur — recognised the significance of that research and moved quickly to build exclusive commercial access to it, and to the parallel program already underway at the University of Toronto under Professor Harry Ruda, whose work has been cited nearly 9,000 times and who completed his postdoctoral fellowship at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

The model is straightforward: Delta funds the research, the universities conduct it, Delta holds the exclusive global licensing rights to whatever IP emerges. Toronto retains 1.5% of net sales.

The universities get funding and flexibility. Delta gets the patents.

What’s Happened Since February?

The answer, so far, is that it is delivering faster than expected.

The first signal came on 26 February, when Delta announced it was advancing C$269,000 of Year 2 research funding to the University of Toronto well ahead of the scheduled July 2026 date.

Early advancement of funding typically reflects strong research progress — the team needed additional cryo-refrigeration capacity to accelerate experiments, and Delta moved to provide it.

Jones visited the Toronto lab in mid-February and described seeing materials being worked on at the atomic level.

When a company accelerates research funding ahead of schedule, it’s usually because the results justify it.

On 25 March, Penn State published its own formal announcement of the research partnership with Delta, providing independent institutional validation of the agreement first announced in February.

Penn State’s senior vice president for research described the university as ‘well-positioned as we approach the so-called quantum revolution’ and confirmed that the partnership would accelerate Knappenberger’s work into the quantum properties of gold nanoclusters.

As an FYI, Institutional press releases from major research universities are not issued casually.

Delta also secured a listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under ticker O2J, broadening its investor base into European capital markets and increasing visibility with institutional investors on the continent.

It also established a Strategic Advisory Panel and appointed Dr Thomas P Davis as its first member. Davis is co-founder and CEO of Oxford Sigma, holds multiple patents, has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific literature, and chairs the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ committee on fusion energy devices.

He holds a DPhil in Materials Science from Oxford and an MEng in Nuclear Engineering from Birmingham.

Davis brings exactly the kind of advanced materials pedigree and IP commercialisation track record that Delta needs as it moves from early-stage research toward patent prosecution and eventual licensing conversations. His experience translating laboratory science into defensible intellectual property is directly relevant to where Delta is heading.

On 9 April, Delta appointed Haynes Boone as its global intellectual property counsel. The firm was recently ranked the second best-performing American patent prosecution law firm out of 250 by analytics platform LexDana and has filed more than 19,000 patent applications in the past five years across the United States and internationally.

You do not hire the second-ranked patent prosecution firm in America if you are not expecting to file serious patents in serious volume.

This appointment was a clear signal of intent.

Today, intent became reality.

Penn State filed three full patent applications that Delta is bringing into its IP portfolio.

All three relate to exploiting gold and other materials for their quantum mechanical properties for sensing, computing and information processing.

The patents address the ability to encode, manipulate and read out quantum states using solid-state materials that offer stability and scalability — the two properties that have eluded quantum computing researchers for decades.

The filing details remain confidential at this stage, which is standard practice for early-stage patent prosecution.

What’s not confidential is the commercial structure. Delta holds an exclusive licence to one application under the existing Penn State agreement and is adding the remaining two, with a 1% royalty on sales exceeding $20 million applying across all three.

The patents are filed under the International Patent Co-operation Treaty, meaning specific countries for registration can be selected as the commercial picture develops.

Equally significant is that in light of these results, Delta and Penn State have agreed to expand the research sponsorship from $3 million over three years to $6 million over up to six years.

The research is, in the company’s own words, ‘well ahead of schedule.’

It’s worth pausing on what the three patent applications covering the quantum properties of gold nanoclusters could actually represent — IF the science holds up.

Pure speculation follows, and should be read as such.

But the fundamental bottleneck in quantum computing has never really been processing power or software architecture.

It’s the qubit itself — fragile, temperature-dependent and extraordinarily difficult to scale.

If the materials described in these patents genuinely demonstrate stable, tunable quantum states in solid-state gold clusters that can be synthesised in quantity, you are potentially looking at IP that sits directly across the critical path of every major quantum computing program on the planet.

IBM, Google and Microsoft have each spent years and billions optimising around the limitations of their chosen qubit architectures. A material that sidesteps those limitations entirely potentially obsoletes them, or at a minimum forces every serious quantum player to either license around it or acquire it.

The Oxford Ionics precedent is instructive: a tool to measure qubit properties, not a working computer, sold for billions. Delta doesn’t need to have solved quantum computing.

It just needs to have patented something that sits close enough to the solution that the people spending $3 billion a year cannot afford to ignore it.

Of course, patent applications is not proof that they have done that. But it is the first concrete evidence that the science is producing something the researchers believe is worth protecting.

Geopolitical Backdrop

Timing has also been kind to Delta in one important respect. The US government recently announced it will award up to $2 billion in grants to quantum computing companies including IBM, GlobalFoundries, Rigetti and D-Wave, with the Department of Commerce potentially taking equity stakes in participating firms.

This is quantum computing becoming a matter of national strategic infrastructure.

Delta’s research is anchored in the US, Canada and the UK — the core of the Five Eyes alliance. Jones has spoken explicitly about the importance of keeping this IP within allied nations.

In an environment where approximately 35% of global quantum investment is flowing through China and Washington is acting as a direct strategic investor in domestic quantum capability, the provenance of quantum IP is increasingly a feature rather than a footnote.

The Bottom Line

Delta now has three patent applications in its portfolio. The Penn State program is ahead of schedule and has had its funding doubled. A top-tier global IP law firm is in place. A credible scientific advisor with a real track record has joined the team. The company is listed on three exchanges. The US government has validated the quantum computing sector (which was previosuly perhaps more theoretical than practical) with a $2 billion commitment.

OTOH, this remains a pre-revenue, early-stage research company. The patents are applications, not grants. The University of Toronto provisional filing — the milestone I flagged in February as the single most important near-term catalyst — is still anticipated for mid-2026.

The risk profile has not disappeared. But three months ago, Delta was a single research program at one university with no patents and no formal IP infrastructure. Today it has two major university programs, three patent applications, a world-class IP law firm, an advisory panel, and research that is running ahead of schedule.

The market cap has moved to reflect some of that. But against the scale of the opportunity — and against the backdrop of billions in government investment validating the sector — the enterprise value remains, as I wrote in February, approximately two potatoes and a carrot.

The Toronto provisional filing remains the next major catalyst to watch. If it comes, and if it signals something novel and protectable, this story will have moved to a genuinely different phase.

Until then, the structure being built around the research is looking increasingly serious.