Power Leaves Holdings (CSE: NASA) has made its public market debut. Its shares began trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange Thursday under the ticker NASA folowing the closing of a reverse takeover transaction on August 31.
The company manufactures decocainized coca leaf extracts for the global food and beverage industry, and says it runs the first legal Colombian supply chain for the ingredient. It gets its leaf through an exclusive license with the Nasa Indigenous Community, the same Nasa that now appears on the company’s ticker.
The leaf moves through 3 facilities in Colombia. The first is a manufacturing campus that handles extraction and the company’s patent-pending decocainization process. The second is an INVIMA-registered research site, and the third is an FDA-registered formulation and packaging plant.
Two products are on the market today, consisting of Coca Extract and Coca Essence. The pipeline includes taste modulators, powdered and concentrated nutrient extracts, and coca-based fertilizer additives.
People who followed Canada’s cannabis extraction boom will recognize the leadership team. Chief executive and board chair Pat McCutcheon co-founded MediPharm Labs and ran it as president and CEO, overseeing 2 GMP-certified facilities that exported to 7 countries. Ahmed Shehata, now president and a director, also co-founded MediPharm and served as its general counsel. Before that, he spent more than a decade practising securities and M&A law at Norton Rose Fulbright and Stikeman Elliott.
Chris Hobbs, a chartered accountant with over 20 years in public company finance, is chief financial officer. Javier Giraldo, Pierre Pelletier and Inna Kaplun sit on the board as independent directors.
“Listing on the CSE is a milestone, but the milestone isn’t the achievement; the achievement is that we built a legal coca supply chain from the ground up,” McCutcheon said.
Alongside the transaction, Power Leaves raised US$3.16 million through a non-brokered subscription receipt financing at US$0.25 per receipt. The offering carried warrants exercisable at US$0.30 until August 2028. About US$3.0 million in net proceeds will go toward 3 things: expanding extraction and formulation capacity, finishing the quality audits and certifications customers require, and turning the commercial pipeline into signed supply agreements.
The company had 211.1 million shares outstanding when the deal closed, or 248.1 million on a fully diluted basis.
Power Leaves last traded at $0.11 on the CSE.
