Banzai International - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Transcript

Speaker 0

Financial Officer, I'd like to welcome you to Banzai International's second quarter 2025 financial results and business update conference call. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation, and as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast may include predictions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation.

Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we will attempt to present important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly under the heading Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results was issued this afternoon and is available in the investor relations section of our company's website, banzai.io. Your host today, Joe Davy, Chief Executive Officer, and I will present unaudited results of operations for the second quarter ended June 30, 2025. At this time, I will turn the call over to Banzai International's Chief Executive Officer, Joe Davy.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Dean, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to welcome you to Banzai International's second quarter 2025 financial results conference call. I'll begin with a brief overview of our business and market opportunity before delving into Q2 2025 financial and operational highlights. I'll then touch on some product and strategy updates. Our new CFO, Dean Ditto, will then review our Q2 2025 financial results before I close and open up the call for questions. For those new to our story, at Banzai International, we're developing a platform of AI-powered marketing solutions that make our customers' lives 10 times faster and easier. Our products enable our robust customer base to target, engage, and measure both new and existing customers more effectively. Our focus is on the global MarTech market, which is expanding rapidly due to increasing digital transformation, surging demand for personalized experiences, and the proliferation of automation and AI.

These dynamics have created challenges for modern marketing teams, which must navigate the expansive and complex network of available tools. Our core product suite addresses the issue of disjointed customer experiences and messy data by centralizing all essential marketing tools in the Banzai International platform. We continue to expand our family of products through our target acquisition strategy, which positions us strongly for capitalizing on industry consolidation. Banzai International continues to be focused on our strategy of building and buying products across four key areas: attracting leads, engagement, tracking, and intelligence. We feel these areas are key to marketing success both now and in the future. The second quarter was marked by continued operational momentum and substantial growth, with revenue growing 205% year over year, driven by our Videlo and OpenReel subsidiaries, and continued strong performance for our products.

We're seeing immediate results from having Videlo's next-generation video creation, editing, and marketing suite, and OpenReel's digital video creation platform in the Banzai International family of products. We achieved gross profit of $2.7 million in the quarter, a year-over-year increase of 267%, and gross margin expanded significantly year over year from 69.1% to 83%. We achieved annual recurring revenue of $12.6 million in the second quarter. This represents a 182% annualized ARR growth rate compared to Q2 2024. Adjusted EBITDA was a $1.5 million loss, which compared to a loss of $1.5 million in Q2 2024. Our cash balance at the second quarter end increased to $2.3 million, and stockholders' equity increased to $3.2 million. We secured an $11 million debt facility with an institutional investor to support acquisitions and ongoing operations.

We appointed Dean Ditto as Chief Financial Officer, bringing over 30 years of experience as a strategic financial leader with a track record of implementing critical business initiatives that drive profitable growth at both public and private companies. We also appointed Michael Kurtzman as Chief Revenue Officer, a veteran revenue and go-to-market executive, to scale Banzai International's leading video engagement, production, and webinar solutions. Our customer base expanded to over 140,000 total customers, and we secured expanded agreements with RBC Global Asset Management and other prominent enterprises for OpenReel. This reflects our strategy of expansion in the enterprise and an example of one of the key sectors where we're providing value. We entered 2025 with a key set of strategic priorities, and we're making meaningful progress on our goals. First, we've rapidly paid down and converted debt in recent quarters and intend to opportunistically continue reducing balance sheet leverage.

Our existing lenders are receptive to conversions and early paydown provisions. Organic growth and expense management have provided an opportunity to continue improving the company's cash position. Second, M&A continues to be an important piece of our growth strategy. We follow a well-defined, repeatable process that ensures every M&A opportunity is approached with precision and best practices. This process starts with smart target identification, focusing only on opportunities that align with our strategic vision. From there, we track every step with clear processes and milestone benchmarks. We apply a standard modeling and valuation method so we can accurately assess the upside and risks. Our due diligence is rigorous and designed to uncover both opportunities and potential challenges before we move forward. Importantly, we have the ability to close the right deals backed by thoughtful capital planning that ensures every acquisition strengthens our long-term position.

Third, accelerating organic growth of our current lines of business, we've brought in top talent, including a new Chief Revenue Officer and key sales leaders, and we've built an organizational structure that's engineered to drive new growth and unlock cross-selling opportunities across our product portfolio. Finally, leadership strength. This year, we've welcomed Michael Kurtzman as CRO, Dean Ditto as CFO, as I just mentioned, and most recently, Matt McCurdy as Vice President of Sales. These are proven leaders with the experience, discipline, and vision to help us capture the opportunities ahead. We have substantially scaled our customer base to over 140,000 customers, which covers some blue-chip names across a variety of sectors. Some of our key customers and partners include RBC Global Asset Management, which we recently expanded our contract with, as well as Cisco, Adobe, Thermo Fisher Scientific, UnitedHealth, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Capital One, and thousands of others.

We serve a variety of industries, including healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, technology, and media, and we operate in over 90 countries. We remain focused on targeting the mid-market and enterprise segment while continuing to support our small business customers, and we're taking a disciplined approach to focus on acquiring stickier, high-value customers. Our flywheel business model continues to be at the center of our strategy. Developing great products leads to growing customer usage. This drives additional data and content on our products, which enables us to create additional value through integrations, automation, and AI features. We're building a moat in two key areas: integrations and AI enablement. Integrating multiple products into a single platform allows us to simplify our customers' workflows and deliver on our brand promise of 10 times faster and easier solutions. Continued investment in AI enablement will ultimately be key to long-term success.

We believe that adding more solutions will, over time, expand the context available to us and will enable us to deliver more powerful AI capabilities. Our vision is to generate substantial long-term value by scaling inorganically in addition to the growth of our existing products. Our acquisition framework is centered around profitable businesses that align with Banzai International's target enterprise and mid-market customer profile and our data and AI-driven platform. We evaluate candidates on their ability to attract leads, engage, harness data and intelligence, and measure results. The opportunity for Banzai International is twofold. First, to increase our product capabilities by acquiring strategically aligned products that serve our customer base, and second, by accelerating our path to profitability and scale to hopefully benefit from multiple expansion along the way. I will now turn the call over to Dean Ditto, Chief Financial Officer, to discuss our financial results.

Speaker 0

Thank you, Joe. Total revenue for the second quarter of 2025 was $3.3 million, compared to $1.1 million in the second quarter of 2024. We believe the non-GAAP metric, annual recurring revenue, or ARR, is meaningful in evaluating the company's performance. ARR was $12.6 million for the second quarter of 2025 and represents a 182% increase from $4.5 million in the second quarter of 2024. Gross profit for the second quarter of 2025 was $2.7 million, compared to $0.7 million in the second quarter of 2024. Gross margin was 83% in the second quarter of 2025, which is an increase of 1,390 basis points compared to 69.1% in the second quarter of 2024. Total operating expenses for the second quarter of 2025 were $7.4 million, compared to $4.1 million in the second quarter of 2024.

The increase in operating expenses was primarily due to the additions of the OpenReel and Videlo businesses and overall operating expenses. Net loss for the second quarter of 2025 was $7.8 million, compared to a net loss of $4.0 million in the second quarter of 2024. For the three months ended June 30, 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $1.5 million, compared to a loss of approximately $1.5 million for the three months ended June 30, 2024. Total revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2025, was $6.6 million, which was an increase of 209% compared to the prior year. Total cost of revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2025, was $1.2 million, compared to $0.7 million in the prior year quarter, which was an increase of 63%. The increase was less than proportional to the revenue for the corresponding period, resulting in improved gross profit.

Gross profit for the six months ended June 30, 2025, was $5.5 million, compared to $1.4 million in the prior year period. Gross margin was 82.5% in the first half of 2025, compared to 66.9% for the first half of 2024. Total operating expenses for the six months ended June 30, 2025, were $15.1 million, compared to $8.2 million in the prior year period. The increase in operating expenses was primarily due to the additions of the OpenReel and Videlo businesses and overall operating expenses. Net loss for the six months ended June 30, 2025, was $11.4 million, compared to $8.2 million in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA for the six months ended June 30, 2025, was $3.7 million, compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $3.5 million for the prior year period.

Net cash used in operating activities for the six months ended June 30, 2025, was $9.0 million, compared to $3.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2024. Cash totaled $2.3 million as of June 30, 2025, compared to $0.7 million as of March 31, 2025. I'll now turn the call back to Joe for some closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Dean. We're seeing solid revenue growth across our business at much higher gross margin. Operationally, we're in a great place as we're positioned for improved results and cash position in 2025. We've worked diligently to strengthen our balance sheet and stockholders' equity, increasing our cash and liquidity to advance long-term growth. Our debt facility is also available to support acquisitions and ongoing operations. We have an expanded suite of synergetic products that drive real value for our massive customer base and the right team to achieve our objectives. We're very focused on generating sustainable value for our shareholders, and I look forward to providing additional updates throughout the year. Thank you, everyone, for attending, and I would now like to answer your questions. I'll just provide some instructions here if you want to put questions in the chat, as I see some of you already have.

We will mark those, we'll bring them up on the screen, and then either Dean or I will address them. First question is from Howard at Taglitch. Thanks, Howard. What is your sales cycle for mid-market and enterprise customers? When do you anticipate that your new team beginning to drive sequential revenue growth, will you be able to continue reducing operating expenses sequentially over the next few quarters? That's a great question. Thank you, Howard. We've seen the sales cycle can vary, especially depending on the size of the account. We have some deals that we're in the works that we think are very, very meaningful potentially, but could be one year plus sales cycles. A lot of our kind of mid-market sales cycle comes in between 30 and 60 days. Obviously, we have a lot of customers that will also buy directly from us online.

Maybe they'll buy self-serve and then they'll upgrade over time, or maybe our account management team will get involved and help them upgrade over time. That's, I think, a very meaningful shift to our business model from a year ago. We're now seeing much larger deals sitting in our pipeline. We're starting to see pipeline growth of those deals. This is really why Michael is a part of the team now and Matt and some of the other folks is really just to focus on driving that additional pipeline and driving additional organic growth. We're really pleased with how that's going so far. When do you anticipate your new team beginning to drive sequential revenue growth? We'll see. I think that the team is making progress on this already. Michael's been on board for a couple of months now, I think. He's started to make some changes in the team.

I think some of those things are starting to bear fruit. I think he's doing everything he needs to be doing right now. Really supportive of the work that he's doing. Will you be able to continue reducing operating expenses sequentially over the next few quarters? Yeah, look, maybe I'll let Dean chime in on this, but my view on this is even more important than operating expenses is cost of capital. We definitely anticipate being able to bring that down, and I think that will make a direct bottom line impact. It probably will be, from our perspective, if we can reduce cost of capital, that's much better than reducing operating expenses. We'd much rather like to see an increase in net income coming from reduced cost of capital and revenue growth versus necessarily coming from OpEx cuts at this moment.

Dean, is there anything you want to add to that?

Speaker 0

I would just build on what Joe just said. As the company continues in its growth phase, I do think we'll very selectively add resources where we need to. I also think, yes, we are finding line items right now in our cost stack where we can continue to find efficiencies, especially with businesses that we've onboarded where we need to combine service providers and look for efficiencies there. There certainly are opportunities, and we're working very hard to achieve those.

Speaker 1

Yeah, thanks, Dean. Thanks, Howard. Really appreciate the questions. Here's a question from Jackson. I'm going to pull this up on the screen. What's ARR growth normalized for each acquisition? I'll say we're targeting ARR growth in the 20% to 30% range over the next year, normalized for acquisitions. I think we may see it outpace that depending on what happens with acquisition, but that's obviously going to be lumpy. We'll see. I think one of the reasons that we brought in Michael and Matt is they've both had experience taking businesses from the stage that we are at right now to the $100 million stage and doing that in a three to five-year period. That's kind of what we're looking to do here.

I think our internal target is to get this organically to $50 million in the next three years, but there's a lot of work that goes into that. There's a lot of work to be done. The team is definitely working on scaling, working on closing new relationships. I think if you look at the customer slide that we showed earlier, a lot of new logos on that slide compared to last quarter. We wanted to highlight who some of those new customers are. We're really excited about what the team's doing. I think there's going to be work going into this. That organic growth is an important focus for us. Thank you for the question. Let me see, just going through questions here. Here's a question from Mohammed. Can there be development of profitability with the urgent time? I think, first of all, absolutely.

I think when you look at our adjusted EBITDA, which is basically, in a sense, kind of the way that we look at kind of normalized cash flow, this was pretty flat from last quarter. I think it is getting pretty small. We think just a slight nudge up will get this into positive at this point. Dean and I are working really hard on options for how to make that happen. We think we have some good options there that we're pursuing right now. We're excited to keep making progress towards that. We'll keep you guys updated about that as we go. Thanks for the question. Here's a question from Patrick. Total diluted shares. Patrick, I actually don't know the number off the top of my head. I would refer you to the 10-Q, which has a complete breakdown of this embedded in it.

Dean can maybe tell you if he has a better answer than that, but I know we have a breakdown of it in the 10-Q.

Speaker 0

Yeah, that 10-Q is filed and available. I would say take a look there and certainly happy to follow up with any additional questions one-on-one.

Speaker 1

Yeah, if you want to reach out to, I'll just advance the slide here so you can see. If you want to reach out to Chris Tyson here, there's their email address as our investor relations group. If you have a specific question that doesn't get answered in the Q, let us know and we can help you with that. Thank you for the question. I think this is a follow-up question here from Patrick. Thanks, Patrick. What's revenue retention on the two acquisitions? Have they driven any organic revenue on their own without counting the cross sales? First of all, we've been acquiring new customers across both of these products. We're pleased with how that's going. I think, as with anything in the recurring revenue business, it takes time when a customer's acquired to then recognize that revenue and start to see that inflection tick up.

Hopefully we'll start to see that reflected more and more coming up. I think, again, with the revenue retention, I'd direct you to the 10-Q, but we feel pretty good about how it's going overall on an annual basis. I think, especially in that core customer segment, we feel pretty good about it right now. Here's a question from Paul. Thanks, Paul. Revenue is quite low with many customers. How do you drive revenue up significantly? You need to move forward quickly as you're very low revenue stream and margins. Percentage increase cannot be considered yet. Stock with a reverse is very low on a 52-week range. Let me start from the end of that and work backwards. First of all, I agree that the stock is very low on a 52-week range. I think it's low compared to comps in our space right now.

I think you look at all the progress we've delivered over the last year. You look at all the progress we've delivered to stockholders' equity, to revenue, to gross profit, et cetera. We intend to keep pushing up on that. When you're on an elevator and you're trying to go from the basement to the 100th floor, you got to go past the 10th floor on the way up there. That's what we're doing right now. I think we've made a lot of good progress over the last 12 months and some continued progress even in the last quarter. I think we're going to continue to hopefully see that. We appreciate everybody's support as a part of that because I agree with you. I think that the stock is low on a 52-week range right now when you look at comps.

To address your question on the margins, I'm not sure I agree with you about the revenue being low on the margins. I think the 82, I think, you know, 83%, this is a 1% increase from last quarter. This is a close to 1,400 bps increase over the last year. I think we've seen the margins improve pretty dramatically. I think margins in that range are pretty decent when you compare them to comps across the SaaS industry. We do expect to see those margins move up a little bit more, maybe into the 84% range over the next couple of quarters. We'll see how that goes. We're pretty happy with the margins as they are. Obviously, yeah, we want the revenue to keep increasing.

To answer your question about that, I think what we've seen over the last, in Q2, we've seen a surge of, we've seen many, many new kind of core customers come in, but we've also seen a lot of smaller ones come in. A lot of these small customers, the pattern is, the customer might come in for a very small initial purchase price on a self-serve basis, and then they're going to upgrade over time. They're going to expand over time. Our business model isn't just about that initial revenue that comes when we bring in a new customer. It's really about seeing those customers expand over time too. We've got a pretty good playbook for how to do that. I think Michael and his team are really focused on that right now.

We've made a couple of key additions there that are just focused on driving customer expansion right now. We're expecting to see, not, kind of phase one is got to plumb in, we call this the more beers and bigger bottles approach. We want to plumb in new customers and then over time see those customers grow. We're seeing the customer number grow. That's great. We would hope that the customer expansion will follow that. Thank you for the question. I think we have time for one more question here, which is from Adam Dix. Thanks, Adam. With such high-profile clients and partners, do you foresee any additional expansion agreements like what we've seen with RBC? Is that something of focus at this time? Absolutely, it's a focus for us.

I think customer expansion, both just from cross-selling and also from adding new seats, adding new, upgrading users to higher tiers, all that is a big priority for our team, both Customer Marketing and Account Management. Michael has already gotten in there, started to do a lot of work on improving our processes there. Some of our processes were already really good. Some of them need some additional work. I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for Michael in what he's doing. That's exactly why we brought somebody like that on to help support that. Yeah, we hope to see more of those coming down the line. We'll see what happens. Thanks for the question. I'd like to thank everyone for joining the conference call today. Look forward to continuing to update you on our ongoing achievements, innovations, and growth.

If we were unable to answer any of your questions, please reach out to our IR firm, MZ Group. Their information is on the screen here. They'll be more than happy to assist and direct those questions to us or answer them themselves if they can. Thank you very much.