Good morning again, ladies and gentlemen. The next company we have on board is Minerals 260. They're an Australian-listed company aiming to become a leading mid-tier gold mining company. They're currently advancing the Bullabulling Gold Project, one of Australia's largest undeveloped gold projects in Western Australia. Joining us today is Managing Director and CEO, Luke McFadyen. Please take it away, Luke.
Thank you to BMO for the invitation and opportunity to present today. For those that don't know, as introduced, I am Luke McFadyen, the CEO and MD. Minerals 260 is a new gold company on the ASX, and today I'm gonna talk to you about three key aspects of our company: our asset, of course, our people, and our recently announced funding agreement with Franco-Nevada. In Australian dollar terms, 12 months ago, we were a AUD 30 million company, six months ago, AUD 200 million, and when I sent this presentation to BMO on Monday, we were at AUD 870 million. As of today, we're AUD 1.3 billion. You'll find out why in a minute for that rapid change. It's been a transformational year, to say the least, but incredibly, we've actually only owned our asset for 10 months.
One of the most pleasing outcomes of the AUD 220 million equity raise we did last year was the many high-quality domestic and international investors that we attracted. AUD 220 million raised as a AUD 30 million company at the time, is now a record for the ASX. No one has ever raised 7x their market cap before. As you're about to learn over the next few moments, we don't like to do small things at Minerals 260. This week we announced another outstanding partner and investor, an agreement with another outstanding partner and investor in Franco-Nevada, which I'll talk about in a moment.
Here you see the substantial investors listed, in addition to this, the rest of the top 20 are outstanding, and we welcome Franco-Nevada to the register. This slide really summarizes the company today well. All of us at Minerals 260 are aligned in our goal to become a significant gold producer through the development and then eventual operation of the Bullabulling Gold Project. We're going to achieve that by continuing to attract and retain outstanding people. We're gonna continue to grow the resource, and we will rapidly advance the asset towards an operation. We've got some excellent foundations already, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us at the same time. This is really the exciting thing that we announced on Monday.
This week, we announced this transformational deal, a AUD 220 million strategic funding package with Franco-Nevada, which had a royalty and equity component. We believe Franco is an outstanding partner with us now and one of the world's best royalty companies. We viewed this deal as a classic win-win because the financial metrics were compelling for both sides. For Franco-Nevada, they have increased their exposure to one of the leading gold projects in Australia, which will be in operations before in under 3 years. At current gold prices, there's a healthy margin for them between the price they've paid and the future value. They've increased their exposure to the upside when the asset outperforms, they have increased their exposure to our exploration program.
They have also well and truly shaken up the ASX and how it funds development projects going forward. In the past, the Australian mining sector viewed royalties as uncompetitive event against equity. As we have shown, we don't believe this is actually true, and we think this deal will encourage other mining companies to assess royalties to fund their projects in the future. For Minerals 260, it improves the development schedule compared to a scenario where this capital was not available. We have brought in an outstanding and high-quality new partner who is backing us to develop and operate Bullabulling through non-dilutive funding. This is nothing but a positive for our shareholders. The market response this week has obviously verified that as a good decision.
This funding enables us to accelerate and de-risk the schedule and expand the exploration program substantially from 30 to around 100,000 meters this year, enabling us to unlock an even larger resource, as we put out an update this year. With this capital, we will procure long lead items, commence early site works, construct the first camp, and it gives us a long runway into the construction period. This funding places Bullabulling at the front of the queue for projects moving into operations in the coming years. One of the key ingredients of a Tim Goyder company is the outstanding people it manages to attract. The faces you see here are an excellent team who work hard together every single day. The people here support me in leading this company, and we're all aligned on the goal of getting Bullabulling back into production.
We believe experience with success is important because it actually doesn't come along that often in this industry relative to the companies that are trying. Very few people in this industry discover deposits, even fewer develop and operate them. Few have transactional experience. In this team, we have all of that. In the room today, we've got the chief development officer, Russell, if you'd like to learn more about the project, feel free to ask him. Location, location. It's as important in mining as it is in Miami real estate. We think this is the best location to develop a gold project in the world. It's a 45-minute drive from Kalgoorlie, straight down a federal highway, the location provides us all the benefits that everything the gold mining capital of Australia can offer.
The location just west of Coolgardie also means our plans for further growth in the region are not constrained either. We acquired 130 sq km from Zijin last year in the deal to acquire Bullabulling, and today we control just under 600 sq km, all of the critical ground we need to develop and eventually operate the project. To the project itself. When we first saw the data and information for Bullabulling at the beginning of our due diligence, we started making a list of key features that we liked, and that list has continued to grow over the last year as we've invested in the project and learned more. The 4.5 Moz Mineral Resource shown here has 3 Moz of indicated and 1.5 inferred, along a 9-km strike length.
When we include the Gibraltar deposit, that's not shown on this slide, the strike length extends to 14 kilometers. The names of the smaller areas come from the historically mined areas, this is really one large single deposit. There are several highly valuable features about Bullab ulling. For example, we have a Native Title agreement, simple metallurgy, the location of course, most importantly, it's the commodity and sheer scale of the project. With 4.5 Moz today, 2.2 Moz greater than what we acquired just under a year ago, it is now the largest project not owned by a producer.
Last year, we had one of the largest drilling campaigns of 110,000 meters. With the in recent investment of Franco-Nevada, we will complete another large campaign this year to continue to look to grow the resource. The results were incredibly pleasing from our perspective and in many ways exceeded our expectations. We've been pleased with the results from infill drilling, which continue to really consolidate our view of the MRE. The extensional drilling has been exceptional. All up, last year, we added just under 2.2 Moz ounces, just under eight months of drilling at a discovery cost of AUD 15 an ounce.
This year's program is building on our knowledge of the resource. As you can see in the shaded green areas, we continue to see potential to grow the resource along strike and down dip. Bullab ulling will be the next large-scale, long-life, and high-margin gold mine in Australia. It will establish Minerals 260 as the next mid-tier producer. It will be the foundations from which the company will continue to grow. Within the next 12 months, we will deliver a PFS, a DFS, an updated mineral resource, a maiden ore reserve, all within the next 12 months. All of this will lead to the board's final investment decision in early 2027. With the new investment from Franco-Nevada, we will invest in acceleration and de-risking activities, as I mentioned before.
Finally, to wrap it up, we believe we offer the best developer exposure to the Australian gold price via our 4.5 Moz resource. We have a clear pathway through development and into operations, and we have the team, investors, and capital to execute this plan. I look forward to standing in front of you next year and providing you with a similarly exciting update of the company's activities. Thank you.
We do have a couple of minutes for questions. If anybody has a question, please raise your hand and a microphone could be brought forward, or alternatively, you can put it in the app. Maybe I'll start here with, you know, I've been on stage here for, I guess, two and a half days now, and there's been quite a few development stories going on in Western Australia, in what is typically thought of as a tight labor market. You say you've got your good people on the leadership team. How are you gonna go about staffing for that?
Yeah, look, I think the project.
Talk to the mic.
The project attracts a lot of people. We've been able to hire a lot of former colleagues from OZ Minerals as well. Our network has enabled us to build out the team, but yes, it's getting tight, but I think the quality of the project, the longevity of the project, the opportunity to join a company at this stage is quite exciting, and I think that's gonna continue to attract really good quality people.
Also been noting that a lot of the projects going on in WA have, you know, have added solar and wind or some combination of the two. Is that something you would envisage with this project as well?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's part of the power investigation that we're underway at the moment, and those two sources are absolutely in the mix.
I guess, moving through, have you already selected your contractors for the PFS, the DFS, and so on and so forth, or is that still to come?
We've appointed GR Engineering for the engineering part, and then all the other components are currently under assessment.
Presumably, that would come with a financing, a subsequent financing component to go there?
Absolutely, yeah.
What capital mix would you? Now you've got the royalty in, you've had some successful equity raisings as well. What sort of mix would you expect on the capital raising?
Well, it's interesting. The Franco investment flips our initial plan on its head. It significantly de-risks that funding pathway. What we do next, look, there's likely to be another equity and debt component to it, but the actual specifics, yeah, we're still working through because, I don't think anyone expects such a large investment at this point in their development phase. We're at a huge advantage going forward to think about how we do fund the project going forward.
We have about one minute left if anybody has a question. Well, maybe we'll just park it there for now. Thank you very much, Luke.
Great. Thank you.