Banzai International - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Transcript

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Sir, and I would like to welcome you to Banzai's Third 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'd like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast may include predictions, estimates, and other information that may 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 reliance on these statements, forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions 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 some important factors related to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most recent Form 10-K and our Form 10-Q that was just filed 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 website, which is banzai.io. Your host today, Joe Davy, who's our Chief Executive Officer, and I are going to present unaudited results of operations for the third quarter ended September 30th, 2025. At this time, I will turn the call over to Banzai's Chief Executive Officer, Joe Davy.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Thanks, Dean. Good afternoon, everyone. First, I'm pleased to welcome you to Banzai's Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results conference call. I'll begin with a brief overview of our business and the market opportunity before delving into Q3 2025 financial and operational highlights. I'll touch on some product and strategy updates. Our CFO, Dean, will then review our Q3 financial results before I close and open the call up for questions. One thing I want to do, shameless plug here, I'm going to go back to the first slide. Just want to point out how cool this is. This was made with CreateStudio. If you're not already a CreateStudio customer, go to createstudio.com. You can make cool stuff like this too. Okay.

For those of you who are new to our story at Banzai, we are developing a platform of AI-powered marketing solutions that make our customers' lives 10x faster and easier. Our products enable our customer base to target, engage, and measure both new and existing customers more effectively. Our focus is on the global MarTech market, as we've discussed many times. This market 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. These teams now have to navigate expansive and complex networks of available tools. Our core product suite addresses this by centralizing essential marketing tools on the Banzai platform. We're continuing to expand our family of products through targeted acquisition strategy, which positions us strongly for capitalizing on industry consolidation.

I'll just point out the average enterprise marketing team uses over 120 different marketing tools, which is quite a lot. We'd love for that number to come down to one. That's what we're working on. Okay. Talking about our vision real quick, Banzai continues to be focused on the 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. One of the things that I love to say is that sometimes the factors that aren't going to change in a market are the most important factors in the market. Obviously, the technology landscape changes very quickly, and things like AI, new data availability, are all things that we are bringing to the market.

One of the things that doesn't change in the market is the basic desire of customers, which in this case pretty much comes down to, how do I attract more leads? How do I engage them more effectively? How do I get smarter about them? How do I know what's working and what's not working? That's where we're focused on delivering value for our customers. Some things never change. Talk real quick about our Q3 2025 and subsequent highlights. First of all, our Q3 2025 revenue, $2.8 million. This was an increase of 163% year-over-year. We're pleased with that result. Obviously, we want to continue to see that year-over-year increase in future periods. Q3 2025 decreased net loss by $9.5 million is a 62% improvement. Again, very pleased with that result. Shareholders' equity increased 72% to $5.4 million.

This is a reflection of our continued focus on improving our balance sheet, which we've done dramatically in Q3 and which we've continued to do in Q4. Finally, Q3 2025 gross margin was pretty steady at 82%. This was up about 13% year-over-year. We achieved ARR of $11 million in the third quarter. This is a 168% annualized growth rate compared to Q3 2024. Adjusted EBITDA was a $2.2 million loss compared to $1.5 million in Q3 2024. Our cash balance at second quarter end was $0.9 million. Stockholders' equity increased to $5.4 million, which was a 72% increase from June 30th. We executed a payoff and debt conversion agreement for the remaining principal balance of our outstanding senior secured debt, totaling approximately $4.8 million. The decision by senior debt holders to convert into equity reflects a strong vote of confidence in Banzai's vision and trajectory.

You're not going to see that reflected in the Q3 numbers because that occurred at the beginning of Q4. We are very happy about that. You'll see that additional improvement reflected in the Q4 financials when those are released. One of our institutional investors increased their direct equity stake to 18.7% following the exercise of warrants, demonstrating their continued confidence in our long-term strategy. We secured an $11 million debt facility with an institutional investor to support acquisitions and ongoing operations. Of course, we appointed Dean Ditto as Chief Financial Officer, bringing over 20 years of experience. Is it 20 or 30, Dean?

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Somewhere in between. I like 20 because it just makes me feel younger.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Okay. I like that. Yeah. I was going to say I'm getting pretty close to 20 myself.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go with.

Joe Davy (CEO)

20 years 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 Matt McCurdy as VP of Sales to lead strategic growth and enterprise customer adoption of our AI-enabled marketing and sales solutions, including Demio, CreateStudio, and OpenReel. Our customer base has expanded to over 140,000 total customers. This one I'm really excited about, and I hope you guys will join me in your excitement here. We recently announced the acquisition of the assets of privately held Superblocks, an agentic AI platform for developing and hosting SEO-optimized websites, landing pages, registration pages, and more. This advances our vision of building the AI platform for marketing. The Superblocks platform allows marketers to easily create and host websites, landing pages, and simple web applications using conversational AI.

Building well-designed, functional landing pages and websites has traditionally required teams to use rigid template-based site builders or to possess extensive web development expertise. Superblocks AI agent builds beautiful brand-compliant web assets quickly for businesses, marketers, and creators. Using the platform's AI agent, users can describe what they want in natural language, and the AI agent can then generate the user interface, the functionality, and host the application, host the website for our customers. We plan to integrate Superblocks with the rest of our platform so existing Banzai customers can build custom registration pages, event pages, video pages, and more with ease. I'm going to step out of the script for one second. We've talked to customers that it takes 12 weeks to go from launching an event or webinar, for example, to going through their marketing operations team to getting the pages built for that event, let's say.

12 weeks. That's an enormous lead time. That's forcing everybody in the organization through this narrow team that has to go do all that development. We think the future here is to be able to just let AI do it for you. That's what this acquisition is really about. That's why we're so excited about it. We believe Superblocks will become a powerful new AI tool for our customers. Strategic priorities. We entered 2025 with a clear set of strategic priorities, and we're making meaningful progress on those goals. First, we've rapidly paid down and converted debt in recent quarters. We intend to opportunistically continue reducing balance sheet leverage. Banzai stockholders' equity increased by 72% in Q3, reflecting substantial improvements we've made here. The company has also made substantial subsequent improvements in Q4 so far.

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 using best practices. The process starts with smart target identification, focusing 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 in our current lines of business.

We brought in top talent, including a new Chief Revenue Officer and key sales leaders. We built an organizational structure that's designed to drive new growth and unlock cross-selling opportunities across our product portfolio. That's very key for us. 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 VP of Sales. These are proven leaders with the experience, discipline, and vision to help us capture the opportunities ahead. Very excited to have those folks on board. Talk about customers real quick. We have substantially scaled our customer base to over 140,000 customers. This includes blue-chip names across a variety of sectors. Some of our key customers and partners include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Adobe, Cisco, RBC, Thermo Fisher Scientific, UnitedHealth, Capital One, and thousands of others.

We serve a variety of industries, including healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, technology, media, and we have customers in over 90 countries. I'll say we've seen a lot of success in the banking, financial services, and insurance space recently. We are continuing to focus on that space and seeing a lot of progress there and a lot of great customers and a lot of great pipeline there. We remain focused on targeting the mid-market and enterprise segment while continuing to support our small business customers. We are taking a disciplined approach to focusing on acquiring stickier, high-value customers. Our flywheel—just talk about this for a second—our flywheel business model continues to be the center of our strategy. Developing great products leads to growth in 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. I think this is, again, really, really important for investors to understand. First area is integration. Second area is AI enablement. Integrating multiple products on a single platform allows us to simplify our customers' workflows and deliver on our brand promise of 10x faster and easier solutions. As an example of that, a customer that uses both OpenReel and Demio can automatically pull their OpenReel videos into Demio to use as assets in their webinars. That's extremely powerful. That's just one example. Second part here, continued investment in AI enablement will ultimately be key to our long-term success here. That AI is obviously the future of the marketing tech industry. We believe that adding more solutions over time will expand the context that's available to us and will enable us to deliver more powerful AI capabilities.

I'm just going to elaborate a little bit on that. Context is really key to us. In AI nomenclature, context is the amount of data that you can get into the AI. Every AI comes with a built-in context, which is the data that was used to train the model. That's a lot. That's a lot of context. To make AI work for a business, it really needs to have the data that's specific to that business. It needs to know who their customers are. It needs to understand their products. It needs to understand their value propositions. It needs to understand their strategy, all of that. The more that we have that data, the more context that we can get into that AI and into those models, the better job we can do of creating value for customers through those features. Finally, continued focus on M&A.

Our vision is to generate substantial long-term value by scaling inorganically in addition to the organic growth of our existing products. Our acquisition framework is centered around finding profitable businesses that align with Banzai's target enterprise and mid-market customer profile and our integration and AI-driven strategy. We evaluate candidates on their ability to solve one of these four problems: attract leads, engage, harness data and intelligence, and measuring results. The opportunity for Banzai is twofold. First, to increase our product capabilities by acquiring strategically aligned products that serve our core customer base. Second, by accelerating our path to profitability and scale and hopefully benefit from multiple expansions along the way. I'll just say we're very focused on this. We are actively working on this. Obviously, just saw the Superblocks deal this week, and we are continuing to work on other opportunities.

I'll now turn the call over to Dean Ditto, Chief Financial Officer, to discuss our financial results.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Great. Thank you, Joe. I'll walk through the highlights here. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2025 was $2.8 million compared to $1.1 million in the third quarter of 2024. We believe non-GAAP metrics also help investors and management understand our business. So we look at annual recurring revenue, or ARR, as a meaningful way of evaluating our performance. Excuse me. ARR was $11 million for the third quarter of 2025 and represents a 168% increase from $4.1 million in the third quarter. Sorry. Excuse me.

Joe Davy (CEO)

It's always right when you're in the middle of something like this.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

It is. It is. You're right, Joe. Gross profit for the third quarter of 2025 was $2.3 million compared to $0.7 million in the third quarter of 2024. This represents an increase of 213%. Gross margin was 81.7% in the third quarter of 2025, which was an increase of 1,302 basis points compared to 68.7% in the third quarter of 2024. Boy, I apologize. Total operating expenses for the third quarter of 2025 was $6.8 million compared to $3.5 million in the third quarter of 2024. The increase in these operating expenses is primarily due to the additions of OpenReel and Vidello and overall operating expenses. Net loss for the three months ended September 30th, 2025, was $5.9 million compared to $15.4 million in the prior year quarter.

For the three months ended September 30th, 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $2.2 million compared to a loss of approximately $1.5 million for the three months ended September 30th, 2024. I'd like to shift here and talk about our nine-month results. Total revenue for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, was $9.4 million, which was an increase of 190% compared to the prior year period. The total cost of revenue for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, was $1.7 million compared to $1.0 million in the prior year period, an increase of 60%. The increase was less than proportional to the increase in revenue for that corresponding period, which resulted in improved gross profits. The gross profit for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, was $7.7 million compared to $2.2 million in the prior year period.

Gross margin was 82% in the first nine months of 2025 compared to 67.5% in the same period of 2024. Total operating expenses for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, were $21.8 million compared to $11.7 million in the prior year period. The increase in the operating expenses was primarily due to the additions of the OpenReel and Vidello businesses and overall operating expenses. Net loss for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, was $17.5 million compared to $23.7 million in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, was $5.6 million loss compared to adjusted EBITDA loss of $4.8 million in the prior period. Net cash used in operating activities for the nine months ended September 30th, 2025, was $13.4 million compared to $5.4 million for the nine months ended September 30th, 2024.

Cash totaled $0.9 million as of September 30th, 2025, compared to $2.3 million as of June 30th, 2025. I will now turn the call back to Joe for some closing remarks.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Bet you're relieved to do that.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Yes.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Take a sip of water if you want.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

I apologize for the coughing there.

Joe Davy (CEO)

That's all right. That was a mouthful. Thank you, Dean.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Yeah.

Joe Davy (CEO)

We are seeing solid revenue growth across our business at much higher gross margins. Operationally, we are in a great place as we are positioned for improved results and cash position in 2025. We have worked diligently to continue executing the plans we previously communicated, strengthen our balance sheet and stockholders' equity, and increase cash and liquidity to advance long-term growth. Our debt facility is also available to support acquisitions and ongoing operations. We have an expanding suite of synergistic products that drive real value for our massive customer base and the right team to achieve our objectives. We are focused on generating sustainable value for our shareholders. I look forward to providing additional updates throughout the year. Thank you, everyone, for attending. I would now like to answer your questions. If you want to put questions in the chat on Demio here.

By the way, the platform we're using right now, this Demio is one of our products. If you want to run great interactive webinars, go check it out. You can enter questions into the chat here, and we will respond to them. We have at least one that's already come in here. I'm going to address these in the order they come in. First question, did we experience seasonality in Q3 compared to Q2? I'll say we actually saw, I think the market was stronger in Q3 compared to Q2 in many ways. The slight change that you're seeing here was really due to a small segment of our CreateStudio business. When we acquired CreateStudio, and I think we said this on the last earnings call, I think we're kind of doing what we said we were going to do here.

When we acquired CreateStudio, a lot of the revenue of CreateStudio was one-time license revenue. That one-time license revenue is obviously very sensitive to the quarter, very sensitive to what happens in your ROAS and your ads and things like that. Frankly, we just do not like one-time revenue. We like recurring revenue as a SaaS business. What you are seeing is really that we just made a substantial, I would say, efficiency improvement to the way that we acquire customers for CreateStudio and the Vidello products. The vast majority of the revenue now that you are seeing for that segment in Q3 is recurring revenue, not one-time revenue. Yes, the total face value number came down a little bit, but the composition of that revenue that is recurring revenue was substantially higher.

We're also seeing a lot of increase in our customer upsells. That's basically a very effective customer upsell program running now in that product suite, which just gives a lot of credit to the team for that shift. Whenever you're making that shift from one-time license revenue to recurring revenue, there's going to be a transition period where we use the example of if you're Dell and you go from selling somebody a $1 million data center, a $1 million rack of computers, servers, to all of a sudden leasing that or trying to run a cloud, cloud, you're not going to get $1 million a quarter like you would for a one-time sale. The advantage of that, obviously, is you get revenue every quarter from those customers. As you bring in new customers, that revenue compounds.

That is what we are going to see here with CreateStudio. What are our pipeline expectations? I'll just say right now, we are seeing some substantial improvements in pipeline, especially for our mid-market and enterprise customer base, and especially for that banking, financial services, insurance, fintech sub-market that we are really focused on right now. I do not think we have specific numbers to disclose, but I can tell you we have a number of deals that are in the seven-figure range in that customer segment right now. We are working on executing on that pipeline. I think we are doing really great there. I think Michael and Matt and the whole team there are doing fantastic. Bringing in more of those bigger customers, you are just going to see higher gross margins, stickier customers, higher ACVs, just overall higher quality of revenue.

That's what we're kind of going after here. In terms of expectations for 2026, I think we'll provide that at some point. We're not prepared to provide that today, but definitely appreciate the question, and we will provide that guidance in the future. Thanks for the great question. Okay. Let's see. I got another question here from Ed. I'm guessing this is Ed Wu. What does the M&A market and valuations for potential targets look like now? I'll say we got a number of really good opportunities. We're seeing some attractive, some really attractive valuations. I'd say there is probably a little bit more heat coming into the market now. I also think that's a benefit in a way. It means more companies are coming to the market. It definitely means that multiples may go up slightly, but well within the range of what we think makes sense.

Still very healthy for us. I can't really comment on the specific deals that we're working on or looking at right now, but I'd say we do have a number of them that we're looking at. We're continuing to see new opportunities come in every week. Excited by that. Okay. Let's see. Got a couple more here. Okay. This is from Garvett. Thanks for joining. Can we comment on the cross-sell or upsell uplift we expect over the next 12-24 months? I think that, first of all, I think Superblocks is going to be a phenomenal upsell. Can't comment on specifically what the financial impact is going to be, but I can say this is something that is going to solve a six- to seven-figure problem for every mid-market and enterprise company out there.

You can think about what does a company with a 30-40 person marketing organization spend on building landing pages, registration pages, stuff like that. It is well into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year. This is going to be a major, major improvement for those folks. I think this is a very big opportunity for a lot of our customers, especially the type of use cases a lot of our customers have where they want to push marketing down into their organization. I think we're really going to be able to support them on that. With the balance sheet largely repaired and product suite broadening, what are top two or three operational financial milestones you'd like investors to look at over the next 12 months? Certainly, we expect to see continued improvement to net income, to ARR. Again, we'll share maybe specific milestones.

I think we're going to have some analyst guidance maybe associated with 2026. I think the key catalysts for us are going to be just completing the very last little tranche of debt cleanup that remains. That will substantially improve the net income and cash flow for the business. As we improve net income and cash flow, what does that enable us to do? It enables us to take that cash flow and invest it in growing the business instead of investing in servicing debt. It allows us to improve our net income. That is going to obviously be transformational for the business as that continues to unfold. We're really excited about that. Dean's done a great job of leading that initiative.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Thank you.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Just imagine every dollar that goes to pay interest, every dollar that goes to service debt, being able to put back into the business to grow the business, invest in product development, invest in sales and marketing. It is going to be huge for us. We have already seen that impact somewhat.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

I was just going to say we've already seen the positive impact, and we'll continue to see that.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Yeah.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Yeah. Absolutely.

Joe Davy (CEO)

Okay. Can you provide more color on the current pipeline? Which segments of products are you seeing most traction with? Let me just put this on the screen so everybody can see it. Yes, I can. I can say I can't give specific details on the current pipeline other than to say, as I said, we have a number of seven-figure deals now coming into the pipeline. I'll just use an anecdote because it's top of mind. Our Chief Revenue Officer just got back yesterday afternoon from an event we did in New York this week where we had probably seven or eight new opportunities come into the pipeline. All of them were six- or seven-figure opportunities. We're continuing to do those now very regularly.

We're just seeing a ton of energy from our customers, a ton of discussion about how we can help them improve their efficiency, how we can help them grow their business. I think it's very exciting to see that from our customers. The segments that we're seeing the most traction with right now, as I've mentioned, it's that BFSI segment, banking, financial services, insurance, and fintech. When we're looking at acquisitions, we are looking at businesses that have an alignment to that strategy. If you happen to know of any great MarTech, SalesTech businesses that serve that space, we'd really love to talk to them. Thanks for the question. I got another question here from Jeffrey. Most recent acquisition would seem to offer great value. Can you elaborate on what it adds for you and your customers?

How does the value for it look as Base44 made a similar acquisition, paid a lot more? Replit and Gamma had big capital raises. Seems this latest acquisition is nowhere accounted for and you're significantly undervalued stock price. First of all, I totally agree with that. I'll say I believe Replit, I think these three are the three kind of largest competitors in the space. None of these three companies are specifically focused on the MarTech opportunity. I think we're focused on this niche. I think it's a huge niche. I think there are features that we can build that these guys don't have that will make us more relevant in that space. For example, being able to build brand-compliant assets. These guys don't do that today. We can do that. That's really exciting.

Base44 was acquired recently, I want to say for in the $70 million-$80 million range. Replit, I believe, raised capital at a $2.1 billion valuation. Gamma just raised capital this week, I think, at a $1.2 billion valuation. This is a huge space. It is a gigantic opportunity for the company. We are very excited to be in that space. I think there is going to be some continued product development investment. There is going to be some sales and marketing investment. I do think this is something that is really going to pay off for us as we start to roll this out and as customers get their hands on this solution. I agree with you. I think that this is not baked into our stock price at all right now. Thanks for the great question. All right. That is it for questions.

I will say thank you all for joining the call today. I look forward to continuing to update you on our ongoing achievements, innovations, growth. If we were unable to answer any of your questions, please reach out to our IR firm MZ Group. They would be more than happy to assist. Their contact information is on the screen right now. Thank you all so much for joining.

Dean Ditto (CFO)

Thank you, everybody.

Joe Davy (CEO)

We look forward to providing continued updates.