Firstpass Exploration Limited
Know the ground
before you commit the rig.
Ranked, tenure-clean, economically screened pegging and drill decisions. Built from free public satellite and government geoscience data, delivered remotely in three weeks, for about three per cent of what a conventional targeting study costs.
The market
The industry stopped looking, because looking got too expensive.
Grassroots exploration fell to twenty-one per cent of global budgets, a record low, while mine-site work hit a record high. Six major gold discoveries have been made since 2020. None of the last decade's discoveries rank in the largest thirty ever found. Metal prices are at record highs and juniors raised more capital last year than in the prior two combined — and almost none of it went into new ground.
Grassroots share of global exploration budgets — the lowest ever recorded, down from roughly half in the mid-1990s.
Average gold deposit discovered 2020–24, against 7.7 Moz in the decade before.
What a Firstpass targeting package costs against a conventional compilation and targeting study.
Market figures: S&P Global Market Intelligence, 2025–2026.
What we do
Three questions, one engine.
Where do I peg?
GROUND ACQUISITION INTELLIGENCE
Prospectivity ranked over ground that is actually available, with lapse and expiry prediction drawn from our own daily cadastre archive. Continuously refreshed.
Counter-cyclical. Worth most when the market is worst.
Where do I drill?
TARGET GENERATION AND RANKING
Multi-layer evidence fusion led by free government geophysics, blind-validated method, cadastre-clean, delivered as a ranked register with a drill-allocation recommendation.
The cash engine and the proof.
Is this deal any good?
INDEPENDENT DEAL SCREENING
Five business days, for funds, royalty companies and corporate development. What does the free public data say that the vendor deck does not?
Highest margin, least price-sensitive buyers.
The differentiator
Geologists find mineralisation.
Mining engineers find mines.
Every target we rank is screened on whether it could ever become an operation — depth, terrain, haulage, water, power, strip-ratio proxy, permitting friction, distance to an existing plant, and whether the ground is obtainable at all. Two targets with identical geological scores can differ tenfold in expected value once that screen runs. No other low-cost targeting provider sells it.
Depth and method
Open pit or underground changes the economics before a dollar is spent
Water and power
Process water is go/no-go in arid belts; diesel-only needs higher grades
Permitting friction
Permitting risk is the leading cause of stranded discoveries
Obtainability
Ground you can never actually get is worth nothing
Why it compounds
Every cadastre publishes today. None publish history.
Mining cadastres publish current state only: who holds what, until when. None publish what was applied for and refused, who let what lapse, which corridors were quietly consolidated over eighteen months, or which ground has been pegged and dropped four times in a decade.
Firstpass snapshots the cadastre every day and keeps every version. That archive is what lets us tell you which ground will actually come open rather than which ground merely has a date on it — and it cannot be back-filled by anyone who starts later, at any price.
Six Australian jurisdictions are harvested from endpoints that are open, licensed CC BY 4.0, and require no authorisation. We use the official services, never an unauthorised scrape.
What the archive answers
- Which of these 40 tenements will genuinely lapse, and when
- Who has quietly assembled a corridor over the last two years
- Which ground has repeatedly failed to attract a work commitment
- Which holder behaves as though they are about to walk away
- What the neighbour did immediately before they announced
The ladder
Start free. Never negotiate on price.
Belt Brief
48 hours
Two pages on one belt or one company ground position: the three strongest publicly defensible observations from free data, one map, and what we would look at next.
Tenement Health Check
5 business days
One tenement or small package screened end to end: evidence stack, five to ten ranked targets, tenure status and an expenditure-defensible work programme.
Target Generation Package
3 weeks
The flagship. Multi-layer evidence fusion led by government geophysics, blind-validated method, cadastre-clean, every target screened on whether it could ever be mined.
GroundWatch
Continuous
The ground-acquisition feed. Which tenements will come open, ranked by the prospectivity of what sits underneath, with competitor movement drawn from our own cadastre archive.
How to judge us
We publish the misses.
Before we sell anything we run the pipeline over a belt with every known deposit masked out of the inputs, freeze and timestamp the output, then unmask and score it. We publish the capture rate, the false positives that turned out to be salt pans, and the deposits we failed to find. Nobody in this industry publishes failures. That is exactly why we do.
Read the validation protocol