Good afternoon. Thank you for having me today. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
My name is Amanda Hall. I'm the CEO and founder of Summit Nanotech. I'm a professional geophysicist. I've been in the resource extraction space in western Canada for nearly 20 years. I used to work in the mining sector in Saskatchewan, and I did industrial processing in Ontario as well.
In 2018 I quit my job drilling oil wells and decided to start my own lithium company. I evaluated lithium resource technologies all around the world and decided none of them were good enough, so I invented my own. I recently won the NRCan prize for leading female innovator in the Women in Cleantech Challenge. As a company, we're at about 41 employees right now.
We recently received funding from BHP Temasek out of Singapore and Capricorn ventures out of the U.S.A. So we have a lot of international investors—not my choice. I would have preferred Canadian investors, but Canadian investors are a little bit more gun-shy than international investors.
Our technology is a sustainable way of extracting lithium from solutions. It has better greenhouse gas emissions and better waste creation metrics. We have higher yields, with all sorts of benefits to using our technology. We're deploying it in South America, however, so just to feed further into what Robert was just saying about joining forces with the U.S.A. to have a North American solution, I would even stretch that further south to say that we need to have a North American and South American solution to the battery supply chain problems that we're experiencing today.
In terms of U.S.A. resources, we have partners in the U.S.A. that we're working with. We have partners in Argentina and Chile. We do not have Canadian partners, and there are a lot of reasons why, so I don't think it's wise to turn a blind eye to the amount of resources the U.S. has in terms of lithium. I don't know about the other battery metals. That's not my expertise. Lithium is my expertise.
Our technology is at the pilot scale. We sent a 40-foot sea can down to South America just last month. We'll be developing the technology into larger-scale operations in South America as soon as we can.
I'll stop there. Thank you.