Quantum Critical Metals’ Marcy Kiesman on Advancing Gallium & Rubidium in the Critical Minerals Race

In a world where even tiny amounts of rare materials can power major technologies, even the most ordinary rock can become strategically important.That is the wager Marcy Kiesman is making — not in a policy paper or a Silicon Valley pitch deck, but in the plainspoken cadence of a mining executive who still talks like someone who remembers what it’s like to carry a hammer into the woods. In a recent InvestorNews.com interview with host Darren Cudmore, Kiesman, the CEO and a director of Quantum Critical Metals Corp. (TSXV: LEAP | OTCQB: ATOXF | FSE: 86A1), positioned her company as a kind of junction box for the age of electrification and machine intelligence: a Canadian explorer trying to advance a portfolio that includes Québec’s NMX East Gallium‑Rubidium‑Cesium project, the Discovery Gallium‑Rubidium‑Cesium polymetallic project in Québec, British Columbia’s Victory Antimony project, and the newly acquired Prophecy Germanium‑Gallium‑Zinc project, among others — the sort of ingredient list that reads like a graduate seminar but is increasingly being treated like industrial policy.Kiesman’s origin story is less “boardroom” than “bushwhack.” “I actually come from a finance background,” she told Cudmore, before describing a childhood in Prince Rupert spent pilfering her father’s carpentry hammer to “go and bang mica off rocks in the bush because mica was so pretty and fun to play with.” Then the line that made the past snap into the present: “Which is kind of ironic how now I’m still playing with mica a good 50 years later.”The company, too, has been recast for its moment. For years it was known as Durango Resources — a name that evokes prospectors, not processors — until the rebrand to Quantum Critical Metals, a change that became effective in March 2025 and came with a new ticker: LEAP. In the interview, Kiesman described the rename as both logistical grind and strategic gamble. It took time, she said, because “we didn’t really know what we wanted to change the name to,” and because “critical metals weren’t as popular a year ago as they are today.” The word “leap” wasn’t just marketing; she said it was a nod to the early-’90s TV show Quantum Leap and to a posture she wants the company to embody — “future forward-looking things” in an industry that often moves like it’s still paging through the last cycle’s playbook.The heresy she keeps returning to is mica — not as waste, but as host. “We’re… finding mica, using it as an ore mineral rather than just a gangue mineral,” she said, framing the company’s work as a search not merely for a deposit, but for an extractable pathway. She spoke about “finding new ways of extracting gallium,” arguing that “gallium having mica as its host is also a new thing that no one’s really paid attention to before.”Cudmore, playing the role of curious every-investor, admitted what many listeners were likely thinking: “I can barely spell rubidium or gallium… let alone know anything about it.” Kiesman didn’t try to shame the question; she leaned into it. “You are not alone in this,” she said, describing investors who “have no idea what all this stuff is,” and the reflex to measure everything against the familiar talismans of the sector. But she also offered a sharper provocation: “I put them on a sliding scale with gold… I think a lot of people would have their jaws hit the floor because they don’t realize the cost of these things.” And then, the reminder that the real bottleneck is not always the rock: “The trick with most of the critical minerals is processing and trying to figure out how to extract everything out and get it into a useful format.”