Heavyweight funds to anchor Fuse Minerals IPO; Dec 18 listing date

afr.com:

One last dance for the IPO market. Regional copper explorer Fuse Minerals’ float was approved by the corporate regulator on Friday, paving the way for an ASX-listing before Christmas.

Warren Mundine, chair of regional copper explorer Fuse Minerals, is set to promote the IPO at a lunch in Perth on Tuesday.  Alex Ellinghausen

The company, backed by a host of mining bigwigs, will look to raise up to $10 million at the public offer stage to fund exploration at its copper and gold tenements in Western Australia and Queensland.

Street Talk understands Regal Partners and Gina Rinehart’s son John Hancock have come on to cornerstone the raise alongside a commodity discovery fund out of Amsterdam and a Strata Investments-owned natural resource fund out of Bangkok. Strata Investments, formerly Metal Tiger, is an ASX-listed investment company with holdings in explorers and miners like Cobre Limited, Southern Gold Limited and Armada Metals Limited.

Unified Capital Partners have been appointed joint leader managers alongside Defender Asset Management. This represents Tony Davis and Mark Gray’s first IPO since leaving Shaw and Partners in June and establishing UCP.

Fuse Minerals was founded in 2021 to explore future-facing commodities. Its three key projects – Mt Sydney and Mt Sandiman in WA, and Eastern Isaac in Queensland – are looking at a range of base metals including copper, nickel, zinc, lead, silver and gold.

The board comprises prominent Indigenous leader and businessman Warren Mundine as chair and Vernon Tidy, former chairman of Avanco Resources which OZ Minerals bought out for $400 in 2018, as a non-executive director. Its high-profile backers include Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart and Cobre founder and executive