Matt Wilson

Mathew "Mat" Wilson works both sides of the junior mining table. He is president and CEO of Sterling Metals Corp. (TSXV: SAG — the TSX Venture Exchange, where Canadian junior mining stocks trade), the explorer he founded, and chief investment officer of EarthLabs Inc. (TSXV: SPOT), a company that applies data science and AI to mineral exploration and invests in the sector. He also co-hosts Digging for Dollars with Cejay Kim, a weekly podcast that breaks down junior mining drill results and sits down with the people behind the deals. For resource investors, that mix of operator, allocator, and interviewer makes his weekly market read a practical window into which exploration stories are getting funded — and why.

Wilson holds a Master of Finance degree and the CFA designation and has spent more than 17 years in mining as an entrepreneur, investor, and executive. His background includes roughly 12 years as a venture investor, among them a role as principal at Pinetree Capital, a resource-focused investment firm, plus chief executive posts at private venture firms and board seats on TSXV-listed companies. At Sterling Metals, he leads a company whose flagship Soo copper project spans more than 35,000 hectares of Ontario's Batchewana Copper Belt, where breccia and porphyry targets — porphyry deposits are large mineral systems that host many of the world's major copper mines — sit near existing infrastructure, alongside the Adeline sediment-hosted copper-silver project in Labrador. Since 2021 he has also run EarthLabs' investment division.

His investment lens, laid out in a 2024 interview with The Deep Dive at the Precious Metals Summit, is that three things decide whether a junior mining company works: strong leadership, solid infrastructure, and favorable location — with infrastructure as the value many investors overlook. As an operator he is methodical: at Soo, soil sampling and magnetic surveys came before an induced polarization (IP — a geophysical survey that helps map buried mineralization) program, and only then a decision to drill. On Digging for Dollars he applies the same discipline to the wider market, weighing the week's make-or-break drill results and interviewing dealmakers, including a May 2026 conversation with Highlander Silver CEO Daniel Earle on how access to capital in the mining sector has changed.

Following Wilson gives an investor a view of the venture market from someone who both deploys capital into juniors and runs one. His current focus is advancing Soo through its discovery stage and managing EarthLabs' investment portfolio, while the podcast — now publishing twice a week on its own feed — tracks the financing cycle that makes or breaks early-stage mining companies.