Apex Critical Metals on Nasdaq: US$1.86 Million Raised for Nebraska Rare Earth Drilling

A single rig is drilling at Rift, in southeastern Nebraska, according to the company's October 5 release, and since October 23 the company that owns it can be bought in New York as well as in Vancouver. Apex Critical Metals Corp. closed an underwritten US public offering that day and its American depositary shares began trading on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the symbol APXC, according to its release of the same date.

An American depositary share, or ADS, is a certificate issued by a US bank that stands for a set number of a foreign company's ordinary shares, so US investors can buy them in dollars on a US exchange. Here each ADS represents six Apex common shares, and the depositary is The Bank of New York Mellon, according to the prospectus supplement dated October 22, 2026.

Rift is what the money is for

Apex is an exploration company. It looks for deposits and does not mine. Its main project is Rift, which it controls 100 per cent, inside the Elk Creek Carbonatite Complex in southeastern Nebraska, the company says. A carbonatite is a rare kind of igneous rock, rich in carbonate minerals, that hosts many of the world's rare earth and niobium deposits.

The drilling there has been steady. By the company's release of October 5, 2026, about 24,000 metres had been drilled at Rift, and 13 holes were still at the laboratory.

The best of the latest results came from the western edge. Hole RIFT26-024 returned 3.55 per cent rare earth oxide over 116.0 metres of core, and RIFT26-022 returned 2.35 per cent over 171.5 metres. Both were step-out holes, drilled beyond known mineralisation, and the company said they pushed its Trinity Zone further west and deeper. The release states that these are core lengths and that true widths have not yet been determined.

Rare earth oxide, or REO, is the combined content of the rare earth elements expressed as oxides. The part of that basket that matters most commercially is neodymium and praseodymium, used in the permanent magnets inside electric motors and wind turbines. The October 5 release puts the Trinity Zone's share of those two elements in the range of 10 to 20 per cent, which it says is within typical global carbonatite ranges.

The new money goes straight into that program. The prospectus supplement dated October 22, 2026 allocates US$1.3 million of the expected net proceeds to the Rift drill program.

The October 5 release said a single rig would keep drilling well into the fourth quarter, working east along the existing fence lines to find the eastern edge of the Trinity Zone.

Apex also holds ground in Canada. The interim financial statements for the period ended April 30, 2026 list the CAP property, six claims covering 2,824 hectares about 85 kilometres northeast of Prince George, British Columbia, in the Rocky Mountain Rare Metal Belt, and the Lac Le Moyne carbonatite property in Quebec, bought in February 2025 with a further share payment due if drilling finds a material niobium intersection. The company's June financing named both alongside Rift as projects it would explore.

A second market, and a small raise to open it

The terms are short. Apex sold 400,000 ADSs at US$4.65 each on October 23, 2026, with Maxim Group LLC as sole book-running manager, according to the release of that date. Maxim also holds a 45-day option to buy up to 60,000 more ADSs at the same price.

The prospectus supplement dated October 22, 2026 sets out where the gross proceeds go, line by line.

Maxim also receives warrants over 20,000 ADSs, exercisable at US$5.81, or 125 per cent of the offering price, for four years from the October 2026 offering.

Per common share, the price works out to about C$1.09, dividing the ADS price by six and converting at the Bank of Canada rate the prospectus cites.

The same document gives the Canadian Securities Exchange close on October 22, 2026 as C$1.34, so the offering priced about 19 per cent below that close.

Dilution from the offering is in the low single digits. The prospectus gives 97,256,887 common shares outstanding before the offering and 99,656,887 after it as of October 22, 2026, an increase of 2,400,000 shares, or about 2.5 per cent.

The prospectus count supersedes the 96,405,541 shares from the September 24 presentation that Maple cited when it covered the Rift holes on October 5.

The offering was registered in the US under a Form F-10 shelf that became effective on August 13, 2026, and no shares were sold to Canadian buyers, the release says. The company's stated reasons for the proceeds are in its own words: "working capital and general corporate purposes, including advancing the ongoing drill program at the Rift Rare Earth Project."

With Nasdaq added, the company's shares trade in five places, according to its October releases: the CSE and Nasdaq under APXC, the OTCQX under APXCF, Euronext Access Paris under MLAPX, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol KL9. The Börse Frankfurt listing page, read on October 26, 2026, gives the German line's WKN as A40CCQ and its ISIN as CA03753D1042.

The CSE shares closed at C$1.33 on October 26, down C$0.21 or 13.64 per cent, on 106,729 shares, per end-of-day data read at 13:59 Pacific on October 26, 2026. Apart from the company's own listing release, there has been no investor discussion of the offering to report.

Where the company stood at April 30

The ADS raise is the smaller of two financings this year. The larger one came before it. On June 2, 2026 Apex closed a brokered private placement for gross proceeds of C$15,000,500, with Canaccord Genuity as lead agent. Each C$1.90 unit carried a warrant to buy a further share at C$2.60 for two years.

The agents on that June 2, 2026 placement received C$750,006 in cash fees and 394,740 broker warrants, according to the subsequent-events note to the interim statements.

Those interim statements, filed on SEDAR+ on June 26, 2026, are the latest the company has filed. They show cash and cash equivalents of C$9,476,408 at April 30, 2026, against current liabilities of C$2,567,373.

The June placement closed after that date, so its proceeds are not in those figures. The annual statements for the year ending July 31, 2026 are the next filing that will carry them.

Spending followed the drilling. In the nine months to April 30, 2026 the company put C$9,339,480 into exploration and evaluation, and the book value of its exploration assets reached C$12,951,834 at that date.

The statements for the nine months to April 30, 2026 also record C$2,438,241 for advertising and website costs and C$6,850,645 of stock-based compensation, a non-cash charge for options and share units granted to directors, officers and consultants.

Note 1 to the statements carries the standard warning in the company's own words: it has no significant revenue, and "these material uncertainties cast significant doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern." Management is "pursuing various financial alternatives to fund the Company's exploration and development programs," the note says. The June placement and the October offering are two of those alternatives, completed.

The road to a first resource estimate

A mineral resource estimate is the first formal statement, prepared under Canada's NI 43-101 rules by a qualified person, of how much mineralised rock a deposit holds and at what grade. Rift does not have one yet, and every metre of the current program feeds into it.

The company's two most recent documents give slightly different timing. The October 5 release targets an inaugural estimate before the end of the first quarter of 2027. The milestone table in the October 22 prospectus supplement gives the first half of 2027. The later document is the prospectus.

Before then, the 13 holes at the laboratory are due back, and the company said on October 5 that it will release assays as they are received, verified and interpreted. Maxim's option over the extra 60,000 ADSs runs for 45 days from the offering. The annual financial statements for the year to July 31, 2026 are due by the end of November under Canadian filing rules for venture issuers.

The inaugural estimate will be the first formal statement of the tonnage and grade at Rift. In October Apex closed its US offering, opened a Nasdaq line and kept a rig on the ground in Nebraska, and the next step it has named is the inaugural resource estimate for Rift in the first half of 2027.