Ann: Alcoa MoU Progress Update, page-65

I agree with @redliningit and his explanation of what a tier 1 investor could be in our context. But tier 1 investor does carry with it a few different meanings,absolutely.

There are institutional investors, fund managers etc globally - many of them these days as we know.
One example could be let's say XYZ Small Cap Fund.
Managed Funds have mandates, in other words, rules, that they need to operate in with the investment in that particular fund. The Fund Managers have a matrix of requirements or filters that stocks need to get through before they are considered worthy of investment.
They look at market cap, management, sector, SOI, liquidity, .. the list of criteria is exhaustive. The list of stocks might start at 500, then as they move through the filters it narrows down the list to what they will ultimately invest in.
Anyway my point is often the market cap is an important hurdle to get considered by these funds... so no matter how keen they are on a company and it's prospects, if the market cap doesn't hit their requirement they don't (can't) invest based on the fund mandate.

What has happened for us is previously is our market cap finally ticked the box of a few institutional investors/fund managers and they've loved our story and we've been on their list and finally met their criteria. So they've now taken a position.

Where the real growth will come in the share price ultimately will be from these larger investors. They will look to keep adding to their positions and as our market cap goes up to 100m, 150m, 200m it will start meeting criteria for other institutions/fund managers who would be monitoring us closely right now waiting to pounce and invest.

I've got a couple of brokers and speaking to my Morgan Stanley guy for example they just don't research the small market cap end of town. After me going on about FYI to no end he had a look and loves us but his research team simply said we're too small for them to look at.
Again, as our MC grows it will eventually tick their box to look at.

Remember FYI have had zero research done on it yet. Wait until a few big announcements drop and we start getting some research completed and we hit the criteria for other institutional investment money to flow.

It will be a snowball effect.