Andrew Kaip

Andrew Kaip, P.Geo (a registered professional geoscientist), has spent three decades in mining across every seat that matters to a resource investor: exploration geologist, top-ranked mining equity analyst, and chief executive. He is a director of Karus Mining (CSE: KARU), the British Columbia gold company he founded and twice led as CEO, and also sits on the boards of Kutcho Copper and Perseverance Metals. Few junior-resource analysts can evaluate a gold explorer from the drill pad, the research desk, and the CEO's office.

Kaip spent more than a decade as an exploration geologist on projects in North, Central and South America, then five years in equity research covering emerging gold producers, before joining BMO Capital Markets in 2009. There he initiated the firm's coverage of silver equities, rose to Managing Director and Co-Head of Mining Research, and helped build a franchise covering more than 150 mining companies. Brendan Wood International repeatedly ranked him among the top three analysts for large- and small/mid-cap precious metals. In a July 2015 interview with The Gold Report, he argued that cost cutting had made senior producers profitable near $1,100 per ounce of gold and that "gold producers are now in the early stage of a new cycle."

In 2021 he left research to become founding CEO of Karus Gold, now Karus Mining, which controls roughly 995 square kilometres of British Columbia's South Cariboo gold district — the FG Gold and Gold Creek projects — plus the high-grade Mineral Creek project on Vancouver Island, with Eric Sprott holding about a quarter of the shares at launch. He returned as interim CEO in April 2026 to complete the company's CSE listing and launch its 2026 exploration program, handing the role to a permanent CEO that September while remaining a director. Between his Karus stints he served as VP of business development at drilling contractor Hy-Tech Drilling.

His method is technical first, financial second. As an analyst he tracked the cost curves, silver producers, and royalty companies that decide who survives a downturn, calling royalties "the safe-haven trade with the precious metal world." As an operator he focuses on consolidating underexplored district-scale ground, reworking historical drill data into new targets, and moving projects toward a maiden resource estimate (a first NI 43-101-compliant measurement of a project's contained metal; NI 43-101 is Canada's standard for publicly disclosed mineral project information).

Investors can follow Kaip today through his board work at Karus Mining, Kutcho Copper, and Perseverance Metals, his advisory role with the Konwave Group of Funds, and his appearances on mining investment programs such as CrashLabs' Digging for Dollars, where he breaks down how capital moves through the junior market. For anyone weighing micro-cap explorers, his career shows how a top-ranked analyst actually reads the sector, from drill results to financing terms.