Derrick Dao

Derrick Dao is the chief executive officer and a director of Union Power Metals Corporation (CSE: UPPR), a Vancouver-based explorer advancing two manganese projects in Slovakia. That puts him at the centre of one of Europe's few listed attempts to build domestic manganese supply — a metal used to harden steel and, in high-purity form, in lithium-ion battery cathodes, and one that Europe largely imports. Eric Sprott led the company's C$6 million financing in January 2026 and holds roughly 12.8% of it.

Dao is a petroleum engineer who began his career on the natural resources teams at J.P. Morgan, Rystad Energy, and McDaniel, and later co-founded King Tide Carbon, a carbon-credits business acquired by London-listed Cel AI. He became CEO of CSE-listed Highrock Resources in January 2024, where he led the acquisition of Liberty Uranium, and took the same role at Nuclear Vision Limited in May 2025. At Nuclear Vision he hired Andrey Shutov, former president of Uranium One Group, as president and COO, acquired the Slovak manganese projects, and relaunched the company as Union Power Metals in May 2026.

His approach pairs dealmaking with verification. The Slovak assets — Svabovce and Michalova — carry large historic estimates of 13.9 million tonnes at 14.47% manganese and 10.4 million tonnes at 9.49% manganese, but the company treats those figures as unverified until proven. Union Power Metals engaged SLR Consulting and independent engineer Luke Evans to produce a maiden NI 43-101 mineral resource estimate (National Instrument 43-101, the Canadian standard for publicly disclosed mineral estimates) targeted for early 2027, and began its first drill program at Michalova in mid-2026 to test the historic data rather than simply market it.

Investors who follow Dao are effectively watching how a critical-minerals junior is built: a focused commodity thesis, an anchor investor with a name that can be verified, and milestones outsiders can audit — drill results and a compliant resource among them. Alongside manganese, the company holds the early-stage UA92 uranium project in Botswana, and Dao comments regularly on critical-minerals supply chains as trade policy reshapes them.