Endurance Exploration Group goes public

CLEARWATER — Endurance Exploration Group LLC is going public through a merger with an existing shell public company.

Tecton Corp., a defunct company that was previously focused on acquiring uranium properties, acquired Clearwater-based Endurance Exploration Group LLC. In exchange, the former owners and directors of Endurance Exploration Group received 20.55 million shares of Tecton's common stock. Endurance Exploration Group is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Tecton (symbol: TTNC; recent price: 48.5 cents).

“[E]stablishing Endurance as a publicly traded company sets the foundation for the next phase in this company's life,” Micah Eldred, Endurance Exploration Group's CEO, says in a press release. “The public quotation will provide the company with more financing options in the future that can support the company's movement into deeper water, more complex and more potentially rewarding salvage projects.”

The company has also offered options for another 5 million shares of common stock at 25 cents per share to key personnel.

Founded in 2009, Endurance Exploration Group LLC specializes in subsea shipwreck research, search and survey, inspection and recovery projects. The company says that since its founding, it has developed a target list of two dozen potential shipwreck projects for recovery and has started work on locating two.

In mid-2013, it started side-scan sonar search operations for its first project, “Sailfish” off the coast of New England. In addition, Endurance secured a three-year governmental contract from an East African nation granting Endurance Exploration Group permission to search for and recover the “Black Marlin,” a 17th century colonial-era trading vessel lost in the territorial waters of an island nation in the Indian Ocean.