Blackbird plc

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blackbird PLC four-year results investor presentation. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would like to hand you over to the executive management team from Blackbird PLC. Ian, good morning, sir. Morning, sir.

Good morning, Jake. Thank you very much. And good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our Blackbird presentation for your results for 2025. So before we start and get into our presentation, I just want to cover three topics. The first one being on Elevate, which is that Elevate is still in our product market fit stage. We are therefore not spending huge amounts on direct marketing. We are spending money on some marketing, those long-term strategies, and we'll talk about those through the presentation. But until we're through the current market fit stage and we have product-led growth and we have retention, et cetera, then we won't be spending lots of money on direct marketing because that will be capital destructive. Secondly, on the Blackbird side, because this presentation is really about Elevate, I just want to cover up Blackbird at the beginning. So very happily, we were reporting a £380,000 profit on Blackbird this year. We still retained some of our very high value customers working at the very pinnacle of sports and news, including executing very recently the Winter Games in Cortina. And thirdly, I just want to address the cash situation. So on current run rate, Blackbird PLC has about 12 months worth of cash left. We are a very dissonant company when it comes to our cost base and will continue to be so. So thank you very much. Before we start, I want to cover those off. And now I'm going to show a video which really explains and contextualizes The problem in the media supply chain and the video production process that Elevate is there to address. It's a video that we took very recently at a Creative Fest event in London. So this is a very relevant and up-to-date problem.

Can be a pretty slow process.

That's really the big bottleneck of what we do.

So right now is the process of whenever I want to get a video reviewed. You have to make something. We'll do the edits. And then export it. And then you have to take it into another system and upload it to another system. We transfer our Google Drive to anywhere the client likes. And then send them a link. To share it, download it, watch it. It takes you a lot of data. And the review process is quite hard. Sending off videos to clients. And then they come back. And then I get all that feedback. And then I have to respond to that. And then there's a back and forth thing.

There's like a lot of like uploading and downloading and re-uploading. That creates a lot of different versions. It can be a pretty slow process.

That's really the big bottleneck of what we do.

So I hope that helps to explain the archaic inefficiencies that exist, the elevators there to really do away with, to make sure that we can collapse those workflows and save creators and teams and brands up to 70% of their time in the video production process. Now, we're thinking through some stats now, really to show the consistency that we update you on these stats every time. They're still clearly indicating that we're in the product market fit stage. We now have 138,000 people signed up to the product with over 1,000 people that have paid for the product. We've retained around 388, a little bit more than that now, of those customers. But this really goes to indicate that there's still a product market fit stage to be reached. When we look at that 1,000 versus the 388, it's often that there's features missing in the product that we're addressing and Summit is very well aware of that we're addressing in order and a logical approach so that we can make sure that those people are retained in the future. The two that we're really proud of in terms of these or more proud and encouraged by in this page is that since we introduced the new plans at the end of January, over 10% of new subscribers are taking annual plans. So obviously shows that they have faith and commitment to the product. And also the customer lifetime has gone from 5.5 months up to 8.4 months. So for a product that was only started to be paid for in February 2025, this is a very encouraging sign. Still quite a way to go, but very encouraging numbers. Also, the collaboration. So the fact that you just saw in the video earlier, the collaboration is a real differentiator for us. It's a new behavior. So to get people to use this, it's a completely different way to use a video editor than ever before. But you can see that since we introduced the review process at the end of August, that we've had nice steady increase in growth of collaboration through the end of February. So that's a really encouraging sign. So I'm just now going to take you through the product progress and what's coming next. Over to you, Simon.

Okay, so the last time we spoke to you guys, we were at the point of quite a lot of key important new features that were coming to the platform. One of the first ones, which was just quite important for video in general, was to fill things like D-roll, is that we integrated the Pexels stock video library, which gives all our users immediate access to a very vast library of free content. So that went in, and that's one of our, obviously, partner integrations. We also did a lot of integrations on the AI space. So we included AI image generation and speech generation. And probably the most impactful thing for our target market was the subtitles where we're using AI to transcribe and produce subtitles. And we'll show you a demo of that. but another few more important things were also added in this period and as you mentioned we did change the plans or we added three different plans for the product we included the annualized plan um plans aimed at more you know the broad range of the market and we introduced tokens which is a mechanism for people to pay for ai usage but above that we also did a lot of fund foundational work um in making the gpu on the computer so the processing unit on the computer capable of doing a lot more of the work within Elevate. Now, this is particularly important for when we're using, when Elevate's used on lower-end computers like Chromebooks, because they do tend to have very good GPUs, and so it means that we're just going to get better performance. So we're really happy. We stuck. We did everything that we said we would do in that period. Everything's been out there. It's being used by customers, and we're very happy with it. The next bit that we're working on and the things that's going to happen in the next quarter is we're on the cusp of releasing stock music with Epidemic Sounds. We've got a demo for that as well. We're going to also be, based on feedback that we've had from our business users, our marketing teams, we're going to be adding font management so people will be able to upload their own custom fonts that brands use so that all the text within their videos can be consistent with their brand. But also, we're going to leverage the work that we've done on the GPU previously with the transitions and actually apply that to things like effects and animations. So we're getting closer and closer to this being very, very capable of competing with the higher-end video editors. And something that is really important for our customers is more audio tools. At the moment, we have audio editing in levels, but we haven't implemented things like noise reduction and dubbing and dynamics in EQ. And we're going to show you some demos of that now as well, actually. So if I jump straight into a demo, um let's go with the transcription first so here's a video of um of caroline one of our marketing team and in this video the benefit we've got audios on there and what we can do is actually go down here turn on the transcriptions enable the transcriptions and what happens is i've i've already done it pre so we didn't have to wait for it but what it's done is it's gone away it's transcribed the video very very accurately And you can see it follows along on the right as we scrub through it. But not only are we able to get the transcriptions and put them directly onto the video, but we're also able to go into those subtitles, go into the styles, and actually in real time change the style with which the video or the transcriptions are played back as subtitles. Brilliant. So this is really useful for where we've got users who are working in corporates and need a more formal look, and then obviously the social media, et cetera. And all of that's done with one of our partners, OpenAI, who's providing transcription services. Another key feature that you'll notice is, of course, we've increased the collaboration. So as I'm editing here on our timeline, you can also see that Kel is also in the project. So both of us can be here simultaneously at the same time. Now, what we did in the last quarter, and we were just heading into this, and if you remember the graph that Ian showed of the growth, a lot of that growth has come because of the review mode. And what that means is that users who are editing are able to actually go on to the invite and invite users but rather than so that they can edit and could potentially get too involved in the project but they could just be reviewers so that can be clients or internal stakeholders and then they can just go to any part of the video that they want say you know please uh please give this a look like so that goes immediately on the timeline and it's immediately available here to the editor so kel could pick that up for example and as i'm not doing anything because i'm the one who's got the comment he says he's on it he can go to that particular video and he can say okay fine let me just apply a different look and you've seen he's already out of that look in So our collaboration is really, really improving. We've got more that will come into that space. But for now, we are seeing really good growth in that space. The thing we'll notice in this video as well is our new transitions. These are our GPU accelerated transitions, which is the underpinning. So that covers those, but the really exciting things that are coming are epidemic sounds, as we mentioned. So if, for example, I go into here and go into audio, sorry, music on the side where we've had the video from Pexels, and I type in something like sport, for example, and I say, okay, this could be interesting. We'll play back a track here. And I say, OK, that could be an interesting track that we could use. So I can just drag this directly into the timeline. I can temporarily disable the previous track that was there. And then you can see we can immediately, very, very quickly add audio to the project. So that will be releasing in the next couple of weeks, and we're really excited about that. Now, looking further forward into different audio tools, here's an example of something that we've been working on with another partner, which is around dubbing and revoicing. So let's do audio clean up first. Here's a clip of... someone that we interviewed at a trade show.

I wished someone could actually just take a look at my timeline or I could look at theirs and make the changes.

And you can probably hear in the background, there's a lot of background noise, which is making it hard to hear. But if we run it through the voice isolation, you'll now be able to hear it much clearer. I'll go right from the beginning.

someone could actually just take a look at my timeline or I could look at theirs and make the changes and then make the process so much.

So that's going to really help people, especially if they're shooting on things like mobile phones and they don't have a proper microphone set up, et cetera. Another really exciting thing is to be able to do the dubbing side of things. So if I just give a bit more space here. If I play this video back. You can hear the presenter speaking, but then I can change the language. And we could even have it play back in Arabic as well. So these are just a few of the exciting things that we are going to be bringing to market. And, of course, the product is just the key features. These are the highlights. We're constantly adding lots of little improvements because we know that users come for the big features, but they always stay for the little ones and the convenient day-to-day productivity, little snippets that we have that other products in our space don't tend to do. We've never said that we're going to be pushing out to be as complicated as some of the higher end tools, but the quality of life features that we're adding are really important.

Great. Thank you, sir. Hugely exciting next three months ahead of us on the product side. So just a quick reminder of our addressable market. It really is a huge opportunity that we have globally. The creator economy is made up of 200 million creators worldwide. And as a reminder, the creator economy means people that are actually making money from creating their content, which means they're generally working with other people, whether it be other team members or brands are making that money. That's really key for those people to be able to have a review tool that's quick and easy to use. We're really honing our guns on the marketeers and those adjacent marketing roles, of which there are 6.5 million marketeers worldwide. And the real reason for that is there are three reasons. One is that they make a lot of video, and that video has to be of a certain quality. Secondly, is that just by the general definition, they work in teams, either with themselves or with brands. And thirdly, they pay. Those guys want to pay for their tools. They're not going to put free tools into their workflow. So really important for us to hone our, to train our guns onto a workflow that works for the marketeers worldwide. I'm going to share a quick video of some professional content creators who are using Elevate or have come very close to using Elevate and seeing it in action to give you a sense of the flavor of how they feel about the product that we've built.

And far simpler.

The UI is always just really, really clean. It's really easy to understand. The fact that it's in the browser.

I've never seen anything like this. I love the fact that I've got all my files in one place.

and not have to worry about taking hard drives or cards with me. Being able to collaborate on it together is a completely game changer. And that's given me the opportunity to actually outsource some of my edits. I love that the review piece is that it's not an export. It prevents us from needing to do the whole export. And send it. Bring it back, export it again. Making it five times faster than how I was doing it before. I would absolutely see Elevate being something we could use pretty expansively.

So I hope that gives a flavor of how excited we are about it because we feel we're very close to achieving that product market fit when you hear the guys talking there. So we're going to continue that seeding work with those lighthouse users. You saw Studio 71 there out of Los Angeles, also the DCT UK out of the UK. But we're also working with AI companies, with Indian kids networks, et cetera. So we're getting lots of feedback from different range of customers about what they're loving about Elevate, but also what we need to work on to make sure that we have that fit. We're going to be adding some of these people, these companies, through further events this year, of which we have a full program going through the spring and the summer. The partnership side of things is hugely important. So the fact that Epidemic brings such a high quality library to us is amazing. But what they also bring are millions of users that use Epidemic. And Epidemic will make rules about us when we launch that product in the very near future. So we think the partnerships are a really fantastic way for us to grow and accelerate route to market. We're also building on our PR presence. So we recently were featured in Forbes with an article about our collaboration summit. And I've been on numerous podcasts, including recently from a video out of Australia, which the guy that runs that has over a million followers. So we're rebuilding our presence in that market. just as exciting as well with influencers. So this is a real first dip of our toe into this. We worked with Lara out of New York. Again, the US is hugely important to us as a market, given that well over half of the content greater economy is in the States. And those videos will be launching very soon. Lara is a TikToker who has over 60,000 followers. Interestingly, when we started talking to Lara, she had 30,000 followers. So she's very much a rising star. And we're working closely with her. She'll have a series of videos that she'll be talking about Elevate. And we're looking for that product-led growth. When we achieve that product-led growth, then we will start to do more direct spend on the product in search engine marketing, et cetera. But we have to wait for that moment. So in conclusion, you have a really sizable opportunity to build Elevate, addressing archaic, hugely archaic inefficiencies in the media supply chain. We're working hard to make it fit. It's hopefully happening very soon. And I think there's a number of things that we can pick up in the questions around things that will accelerate us getting there. And thirdly, we're still seeding with very high profile customers. We're really pressure testing this with some very demanding customers in the market. And I'm very happy to take your questions. We've actually had a record number of questions submitted. I think we have 35 questions pre-submitted, which I'm going to answer a few of those up front. But I'm over to you first, Jake, and then we'll go against that.

Perfect, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboard. Guys, as you say, we have received a number of questions, so if I may just hand back to you to address those where appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Jake. Okay, so, yes, there's a number of questions that I think I'll take up front because they kind of do get repeated. The first one is, why do you have a low share price? And I think that's a good question. I think the key reason there is that the market doesn't like the revenue being so low. And the revenue is not high because we haven't spent a great deal on marketing because we don't have the product-led growth and we don't have the product-market fit. This is all part of the process, and we're working towards that fit, hopefully in the very near future. However, I bought shares this morning, as you might have seen, and I did that on the reason that I believe hugely in the opportunity that we have. This is a massive opportunity that no one else owns in this market, so why not us? We've made a huge amount of progress in the product, as Summit talked about. We've got in front of us a big partnership with Epidemic that I'm hugely excited about and that we talked about. We've got the potential for AI to be a world friend for us, and I think that's important. It's a friend for us on both sides. It's a friend for us on the supply side. We can get our features to the product faster through AI, and it's a huge opportunity on the demand side because There is just much more video being created and that video needs to be assembled and that video needs to be reviewed. And that's really where Elevate has some huge opportunities for a big market there. And thirdly, because the price is very low. So I think it's a huge opportunity for anyone buying. Right, okay, so I'm going to go into the questions now that I've got hearing. So, the 1st question, and there's a number of these, by the way, so I'm going to answer right in front is about the world of the robots. So, Bill joined us. I think it was late last year. He's ex-Adobe, and he was very keen to come on board. Unfortunately, Bill has had some serious family health issues and has had to step back from us and other things. And so we're not really working too closely with Bill at the moment. So that answers a number of those questions, I think. The second question is microdramas. It was you, Summit. Does a microdrama create on the budget? Sounds like Elevate would be a good fit.

Yeah, we don't currently support some of the demands that will come out of the televisual space because of their heavy reliance on color grading and audio tools. So we do want to be able to operate in that space. But at the moment, it's such a small market that it's not worth it for us to push too much into that. But we will eventually, Elevate will be usable by almost everyone other than maybe right at the highest end.

Okay, and the 3rd question is on on fundraising. Um, and obviously you saw that we did, obviously, you saw, but we did a small fundraise just before Christmas. Um, important as chair and. Obviously, with the various wants of the board that we have fiduciary duty to make sure that the company is fully capitalized and that we have. Ample reserves or some reserves to market the product when when fit is achieved. The question that I'm looking at right now is asking about, do you think funds will be raised privately? Well, there's certainly no plans for that. We're very happy with our position on AIM and the fact that our AIM shareholders have always supported us. So that's that. Yeah, that's the way that one would go. So yes, we're very happy to be on AIM. The question, it's a SharePay question. I think I've addressed those. It's interesting to see how many small agencies started to use CapCut Pro Desktop over the last few years for various tasks. Elevate.io once has market fit, will be a far better product form to use in my opinion. For many reasons, how do you plan to reach and educate those agencies using CapCut and any other inferior product with prosumer and procreator plans to help them transition to Elevate and be more productive? Yeah, sure.

So agencies are definitely a really, really important target for us. Obviously, Elevate is just such an amazing fit because of the collaboration and because they work so much with clients. We have, I think Ian already hinted during the presentation, we have a pretty exciting events pipeline for for Q2, and some of these events will be more targeting teams, but there are also those events that target these types of agencies more. And from last year, for those who followed along, we obviously attended quite a few events. The product was obviously at a much earlier stage, but what we did learn was that events are very effective in terms of seeding it amongst people. So at that time, we got a lot of really valuable feedback And now where the product is, we feel a whole lot better about attending these events and getting Elevate into these types of agencies' hands.

Thank you so much, Colonel. Next one's a product question, Sam. Figma offer a desktop wrapper providing semi-offline model that targets the needs of professionals who travel or have a disabled connection. Is this something you would consider? Great.

Yeah, the wrapper for Figma doesn't help you if you don't have an internet connection. You still need to have a net connection. But we will be doing something very similar, and it does give us better ability to, for example, cache larger amounts of the video or process some of it into the Blackbird codec locally. So we've always wanted to do that for sure, and it is going to be just a wrapped version of the product.

Thank you. I understand the 5 year EVS license is due to expire in 26. can you confirm renewals are being discussed and would you expect improved terms? I can't go into details about the terms, but I would say that we have an excellent relationship with EVS, including having just executed the winter games as a partner with them. And of course, we were looking to renew that contract. Over the last 12 to 18 months, the core Black Bear business has lost a number of customers. For example, Arsenal, NRL. Is this a conscious decision to focus on higher margin customers or have these customers moved on to other solutions? Which is the latter. Why are people moving away from Black Bear Enterprise? What I would say is that it's a highly competitive market. We are very happy to have our sticky customers, some of the largest customers and discerning customers in the world. There is some natural movement away sometimes from products, but we're very happy with what we're doing there. As I said, we've made a £380,000 profit day this year. Have you seen any evidence of organic growth in usage of Elevate.io growth, not dependent upon active marketing, but via word of mouth recommendations, et cetera? Yes, absolutely. Kelly, do you want to pick that one up?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So obviously we have organic growth. And then I think the other thing that you're referring to is more like product-led growth. So not active marketing, as you mentioned. We're seeing both on the organic marketing side, we're seeing a really good uptick. But also on the product-led growth side, I think the two main mechanisms in the product right now are the team invites and the project invites. And since September, we have seen a very nice steady uptick in in those being used and inviting people into the product and also some of the subscribers that we acquire now, because obviously, we have such good analytic systems, and we can measure everything they do come through through these team and project invites.

anything to add to this one no no um yeah i think that's that's a good answer carol i think that you know we are looking for for high standards there in terms of product growth we want to see that growth really start to to steepen um there's a there's a general definition of of what product market fit is and it's when 40 of your market can't can't do without you um and so you know we're raining at that we're not there yet but um that's that's really that's really our target Okay, then will you be adding AI vidgen?

um we've been looking at two types of video generation one just freeform and the other one with avatars both will be with partners um it was just one of the next things that will happen after we finish epidemic we'll we'll we'll be yeah we'll be reviewing it but we will be adding it soon thank you very much um one for you steve a few months back and a few other shells reported blackbird was being to blackbird that's elevate io was being used by some promotional

uh guy on linkedin is there anything you can add to that yeah well thank you yeah thank you for contacting us yes we were aware of it and is causing a bit of confusion we've been in touch with this other brand and he's promised to to rebrand it takes a little bit of time but i've been in touch with him recently and it's in progress so um he'd be moving away from the avate.io brand shortly

How close are you to providing forecasts? We were templating closer a few years back. Can you give an indication in weeks or months? I think our indication would be when the revenue engine makes sense and we start to get a repeatable route to market through marketing, then we'll be more confident to give a forecast, but we're not at that stage yet. At the interim's presentation, you mentioned that two ads would soon air on YouTube, and were these shown as part of your presentation? Did this ever happen?

The good news is, yes, both of these ads are currently live and running, with obviously a A conservative budget, but they are alive and running. So, yes, they are being used with very specific targeting. So, you know, even if you don't happen to come across them, then, you know, it just means our targeting is working. Essentially, we obviously want to make sure that the right people see the ads because that's what we're paying for.

The broker notes released on Monday included some analysis of collaboration, which we went through earlier in the presentation. Do you think this is an important driver of both usage and adoption in Elevate? It's really one of a number of different value propositions that we have in Elevate. It's a big differentiator for us. So we see it as a big driver, a big lever, yes.

And it's worth stating, actually, that chart was all based around non-ad spend, so through organic means. So, yeah, we actually saw higher figures if we add in the ad spend.

That's a really good point. Yeah, we cleaned out all or any Google ad spend because that could pollute the data. So what you saw in that chart is pure organic. Has Elevate entered to scale up? If not, why not? I'll finish that question there because we haven't achieved product market fit yet, and when we do, we will certainly let you know. Given the presentation at the time of the two-million blazing last year and the talk of increasing subscriptions and early hockey sticks, were you surprised by the subsequent churn immediately thereafter? The presentation provided a very bullish view that almost immediately appeared to stop.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I think at that time, you know, for those that remember, we obviously had our 50% early bird discount, which made it very attractive for people to subscribe to a product that is obviously nowhere near successful. where it is today so obviously as a when we went full price we saw that impact and i think that's that's what you're referring to and as was mentioned during the presentation in response to that we have completely redesigned our our plans and uh yeah we were seeing some positive results from that thank you very much

With the product might never be finished, how do you see development costs once the features referred to in the alibi nodes have been realized? And do you see that a lot of the main features needed to scale up are there and development costs can be weighed in? Or do you consider such costs will remain the same? It's probably Steve and Summit crossing that one. Yeah, do you want to talk about the product more?

Yeah, so I can talk about the cost. There's a couple of things that are happening. We're getting faster. We spend a lot of time, as everyone knows, building the infrastructure for Elevate. And now we're actually able to develop things faster and faster. That's also been added as something that you mentioned earlier, that AI is being used quite extensively. within the product development phase now, because it's at the stage where it is actually useful. But also because we've done a lot of that foundational work, it's very easy for us to now sort of add self-contained parts of work. So what we expect is the acceleration of the product to increase. It may feel like, oh, we're nearly there, we're nearly there. Well, what we are is we're very nearly there, and if not already there for many customers as a very usable product. what is now going to help is that we're just going to be able to escalate faster and faster and actually just widen the use, how many people are usable too.

Yeah, on the cost side of things, I'd say on the short term, you'll probably see a little bit of a dip, but due to some changes that we've made within the team over the last few months or so, but yeah, going forwards or whatever like that, as Sumit said, you know, we've got a list as long as our arms that we want to achieve. So I'd imagine that development costs will stabilise.

Thanks, guys. There's a question, quite a long question, so I'm not going to read it out fully. But it asks about the raise. So first of all, why the raise and why no TR1 came through? So I'll address the why the raise. I mean, it's really about fiduciary duty to the company. As I mentioned at the start of the presentation, we have a 12-month runway with Blackbird. And that is in large part because we did a raise before Christmas. So we want to make sure that we don't run out of money and we won't have enough capitalization to market the product to. In terms of the TR1, Steve?

Yeah, in terms of the TR1, you know, we haven't received anything. The company can only issue a TR1 to the market when it receives that information itself. We haven't received anything. I'm told from our broker, Allenby, that they contacted the individual. We're not going to speculate as to why they haven't issued a TR1, but nothing's been forthcoming.

Okay, so there's a long question about product market fit here. I'll try and pray to you. Product market fit and customer profile stages. I understand that product market fit is important to ensure the product matches the market. That's all great, but drawing out this process could also be used to delay accountability and justify a lack of growth in WOW and MAU and paid subscribers. Those metrics are the ultimate test of whether an elevator is growing, succeeding, gaining traction, adoption, and acceptance. Okay, you're absolutely right. So there's a lot of data you put into this question and you're absolutely right. So we want to make sure that we do have those wows and mows growing as in weekly active users, monthly active users growing. We want to make sure that retention is there. We want to make sure that organic growth is there and turning into an exponential curve. Absolutely right anything anything that is going to cloud those those numbers, which means. Massive spending in search engine marketing, we're not willing to do at this stage because that is a clouds the data, but also. You know, we have limited resources, we have limited reserves and therefore we don't want to destroy that. And we want to make sure that we wait until the appropriate time when the, when the metrics are coming through. That really showed that we've got that momentum. and that the revenue engine is really starting to make sense from a maths point of view, then we will spend the money. I hope that answers the question. But yeah, I've said several times that we haven't reached that stage yet and that we are working towards that stage as soon as we can. Blackbird division, given the successful repeated renewals with global leaders in sports and entertainment, Blackbird is clearly the leader in its field. To what extent is our technology indispensable to these customers? If it is indispensable, is there any reason why our pricing is not significantly higher? Hypothetically, if we doubled our pricing, where would these global names go to? Do they have alternatives? As I mentioned before, it's a competitive market. There's a lot of people in that market and actually it's ever shrinking or it's not going very fast. So the competition is ever intensified. So there are alternatives to using Blackbird clearly because we're only a very small part of the market, the market share. So we have to work hard from every perspective, from our communication perspective and sales perspective to make sure those contracts are always renewed. Um, the research report suggests signups have increased from 111 to 138 case in September. Despite what appears to be much lower paid search. Have you therefore seen any improvements to sign up and acquisition costs? Well, we're not going to go into lots of detail about lots of different metrics. We give you the metrics that. Um, but we said we would every time, um, this is probably market fit stage. It's a period of experimentation. Um, therefore metrics are moving around. Um, so therefore it doesn't make a great deal of sense to kind of keep, keep talking about them. Sometimes we'll do something that really works really well, or maybe we do some of those works as well. So at this stage, we wouldn't want to hone that, that, that route to market so that we can, when we start to spend the money in larger sums, it really works for us. Why has it taken two and a half years since unveiling Elevate.io concept to add features like Pro Audio, given that Blackbird already has professional-grade editing features?

I can't deny that audio is at the moment a bit of a weakness for us, and it is something that is crucial. We do just have to build. We can't do everything at once. In some ways, by not doing audio, we're in a better position because of the way in which audio is now being done with AI. So actually, if we'd invested a huge amount of money in traditional audio editing capabilities, we would probably have wasted a lot of that because a lot of it is easier to replace. um now so it's it's really important to us we care about it it's crucial to video production especially as you move into the higher end users and so you will be seeing some movement in space we did in the demo today we showed some examples of that um but also just traditional uh audio filtering will be will be in the product

Thank you very much. Competition question here. So good quality cloud-based video editing with collaboration is becoming widely available, even on low-end Chromebooks via platforms like Flixia. How does management respond to the concern that we might have lost our first mover advantage and our core USP? I don't think it's that common, I have to say, but certainly it's a space that people want to own. Nobody owns it currently. Anything you want to pick up on this?

Yeah, I do think we are much further ahead in the collaboration space than anybody. Not that others aren't catching or the market isn't widening. Of course, evidence of more players in the market is a good thing. That's a good thing for us in general because it helps spread the size of the market. The market's infinitely big enough for multiple players players um so yes of course it would be great if we were able to push ahead and and get in front of more people and then we would you know we would be able to um be more awareness and then use our first mover advantage yeah

And a related question here. So while our primary USP is collaborative creation, the wider market seems to place a higher value on collaborative review, which is now ubiquitous. How will the commercial model be adapted if we discover that our main USP, collaborative creation, is viewed by the market as a nice-to-have rather than a key differentiator?

Yeah, we do both. I mean, review is very strong for us as well. And the reason why review is a big part of the market is because review is the only thing that really exists. Co-creation isn't something that's ever existed and it is a new part of the market. They both actually go perfectly hand in hand together. So we're, you know, we feel like we're in a great position. Our review tools are strong, but we're in a really good position in the co-creation space because it's an almost impossibility for the higher end products to add it and the lower end products just haven't done it well. So both things can exist simultaneously and that is part of our strategy. I can work with Kel on an edit, but then we can share it with Ian for review. So it just makes real good sense for the... In fact, that's exactly how it works. If you think about how it works within our organization, Kelly and Chiara make the bulk of our content, add a few external providers, and all that content is created in Elevate. And they'll work within a group and they'll share things and will occasionally jump in as somebody and users to add something. But then the final reviews go out to Ian and others and so on and so forth. And that's in the review mode. So it's exactly how we use it. And both sides of that are very, very useful.

I think it's worth also referencing the video that we showed first today as well. No products were mentioned there on that video. WeTransfer was mentioned. But the main competitor here, the company that owns the market for review is Frame.io. And so use Frame.io together with an NLE. You have to download your video from the NLE and upload it again to Frame. That is a slow process. Second thing about that process is that the reviewer is only ever working on a render of the video. So they're working on either an out-of-date video or they've stopped the editor from working. So one of the two things that happened. So again, it's a big time sink, a big waste of time. So it might be a common product to use and pretty much everyone we talk to says they use it, but it's not a perfect product by any means and Elevate is a huge improvement in that. Um, okay, so there's a couple of questions here on on stats. Um, what is your. What is your annual contract value and your churn rate? Um, as I mentioned before, we're not giving that out at this stage. They are actually able to be worked out from the numbers we've given you. I think, uh, but, but, uh. Again, while we're in this product market fit stage, it seems fairly meaningless to give out give out detailed numbers on that because we are in experimentation mode and we will continue to be until we finish that phase. According to the curve visuals, for instance, the previous meetings, you have said you have been in scale up for a while. No, sorry, I'm going to stop that one there because we haven't been in Scala for a while. We're definitely, definitely, definitely still in probably market fit stage. Okay. Ian, this week you've defined the target market as professional creators working within brands and in-house brand and marketing teams. What is the TAM value of the target market? Well, I've given you the numbers of people that are working in there, and we've previously given you a TAM of around $6.9 billion as the market opportunity. We think that's not an inaccurate number. It was a 2022 number, so we think that's only grown. So it's a huge number. Shareholders are taking continuous pain in the share price and dilution. What is the tangible hope for them? Well, yes, as also a shareholder that's had tangible pain. And as you know, my family and I have invested a lot of money into this company, over two million pounds into this company. I completely understand your pain. As you've also seen, I've invested again this morning and I've given you the reasons for that. I think it's a great investment, a great time to invest in this company. But we think we're getting to the end of that product market fit stage. I've got huge amounts of faith in Summit and the team in delivering that product market fit. And so we're excited about what happens next. Okay. How is EVS getting on with the codec? So any question or updates there, Steve? Do you want to?

No, really. Oh, yeah. They're using it. They've been selling it more widely. But, you know, we can't go into any details in terms of customers, et cetera, because they're not our customers. But, yeah, we have a great relationship with them. And, yeah, the dev teams as well have a really, really good relationship and enjoy working together.

Do you anticipate expanding Elevate to work on mobile devices, iPads?

We will continue to expand the mobile coverage for things like upload, etc. And it's always on the cards that we will be able to become more mobile-focused down the line.

We have a Safari version as well now for Elevate, and obviously all the iPads run Safari. So it's getting a lot simpler to make that jump when we need to.

Question for you, Stephen, coming up here. How does Cutting Room manage frame-accurate multiplayer, high-definition video editing without our codec? From a technical perspective, what's the stop in producing a prosumer product like Elevate?

So you can run, if you have more processor and more bandwidth, you can do whatever you want on a modern system is to do with the efficiency and the flexibility of it and the responsiveness and ultimately the cost. So we haven't emphasized cost yet because we're product market fit stage. But over time, as these products get to be used very widely, the profit margin is going to be one of the major factors. And you've seen from our original Blackbird Cloud, we have 90% gross margin, up to 95% some years. And that is way higher than any other web-based video product. So that technology, some of that's used in Elevate, but we will be adding more of that to Elevate. And that will give us a really big advantage in the market with just the margins that we have.

Yeah, I think it's the infrastructure cost behind that that's really important. Okay, question about conversion. With a 0.28% conversion rate from registered to paying users, you've stated you're nearing the end of product market fit. Um, given the half a 1M pound raise for marketing, what specific feature gaps or friction points have you identified. As the primary barriers to conversion and retention and what specific percentage will you consider the product truly scale up ready? So the point to a, I don't exactly how that's been calculated, but I presume that's over the entire base of people that we have. Obviously, we're in a curve where things are improving all the time and conversion is improving all the time. It's definitely not 0.28 at the current stage. But what's the first of all, the friction points and the features?

Yeah, it's features. I mean, every time we add a new feature, we satisfy a slightly larger market. we've got a number coming up and it will never end because they'll always be, you know, we'll always have to keep adding features to satisfy everybody and they evolve even the same users over time. But it has been historically the main reason, the main feedback we get is that is missing features.

Yeah, I think it's absolutely missing features and having those features presented in such a way as to delight the user so that they're used as well. So that's really key. For us, it's also the second part of the question is when do you think your scale up ready? It's when we've moved the revenue engine to a place where the maths make a lot more sense. Um, it's not necessarily going to be a note of the character, which wants to see the momentum sustained momentum to that point. And then we feel that we're in a place to apply more more finances to the market to the marketing. Um. Did you not consider the damage that would occur to your credibility when you undermine the share price by doing a secret deal and provide credit to the buyer for the last tranche of shares and never disclosing who the buyer was? As Steve said, we can only follow the rules that are given to us in terms of disclosure. Anything else you want to pick up on?

There's nothing else to add, really.

We have a judiciary duty to the company to make sure that we're capitalized.

And also under GDPR as well, we're not allowed to give names of users if they don't want it.

Yeah. Great to see we signed a brand deal with Lara, the New York influencer specializing in video editing. Mercers here endorse Elevate for those who like desktop. Although it seems odd that she says she edits all our videos on a phone, not desktop, but maybe this means we have a mobile editor lined up for the launch in 2026. Well, I think she's maybe changing the way that she edits, but something on the mobile side.

Yeah, no, we won't have that through 2026.

You did a marketing push for Google AdWords last month with the new landing page and several new features since the last push. How were conversion metrics compared to the 2025 AdWords push? We're not going to give out detailed stats, as I mentioned earlier, but we were dipping our toe into certain areas during the experimentation phase of product market fit, and we will continue to experiment. Do you have any feedback into why 99% plus of users who do not convert to subscribers decide not to pay for Elevate? I guess this features question, I guess, is the...

I mean, not everybody has an immediate need. The whole point behind a freemium platform is that these users who may come may use it within the realms of the free offer and then may convert down the line. So we have seen people who have converted after quite a long time of being in the free zone. So it's not that we expect that everybody will convert immediately. And it's also acceptable that people come along, maybe sit in free, then pay and then go back into the free zone and come back later. Not everybody has an immediate project. that they need to work on or that they need all our tools for. So we don't see it, you know, the whole point behind Freedom is that we have this vast quantity of users that we can talk to. And over time, as we add things, it may come right for them.

Question on when will you ramp up marketing spend? I refer to the revenue engine answer I just gave, which is we will know when we are further along to making those maths work for us in terms of additional spend. Despairing a shareholder for over a dozen years and a YouTuber for over eight, I have only just started using Elevate. I'm pleased to say that it is brilliant, and I wish I'd said using it earlier. However, were I not a shareholder, I can't think of anything that would have persuaded me to try it. I was using iMovie, which worked perfectly fine, and I would have thought, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Addressing this problem of inertia would unlock an enormous amount of small collaborative YouTuber market. How can it be done? Cal, I guess that's got a question for you.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I think I think there's there's two things right in terms of like, you were using iMovie. There's two things that set us apart. And that's the browser based aspect of elevate. And there's the collaboration. So if either one of those things is is a good reason for somebody to come to Elevate, that would probably make sense to switch from iMovie. But also, we're also acquiring a lot of people that haven't been using iMovie. In fact, they're just starting their video editing journey and they are looking for something and then they find Elevate and it just makes sense to them that it is online and in the browser, just like so many things are online and in the browser nowadays. So, yeah, I think that kind of answers that question. We're acquiring a lot of new people that don't have prior kind of notions. And in terms of the marketing teams and agencies, the collaboration is obviously such a unique USP that it just makes sense to move, especially if you're going to be saving so much time when you're collaborating and getting reviewed on.

Yeah, I think for this, it's really a case of analyzing, identifying what the jobs to be done are. And as we said, we really see that the jobs to be done for marketing teams, they're similar to the creators, but there's still work to be done there to make sure that we're really answering those needs and really have a workflow that's suitable for those needs. And that is part of the product market fit stage. I think then we can address the inertia that exists. Regarding the use of ElevateIO, are there plans to be able to use two monitors? Obviously, you can already have a browser window on each monitor, but you can't spread the interface between the two.

We talked about it a lot. It's not as easily done in a browser as you might imagine because it's not easy for browsers to communicate, browser windows to communicate independently. But there is talk of palming off some of the aspects onto a second browser and then essentially be able to use things like media management that way. But it's not easy. We definitely are looking at how do we support multiple video windows within the same interface and yeah, more to come on that.

It's worth mentioning because it's collaborative, you can actually run Elevate twice, one in each window, and you can have one with your media page and one with your timeline, and you can have one for reviewing, publishing, published videos as well. So it is possible to use it with multiple windows, but as Sumit's a bit of a perfectionist, as you probably noticed, he's looking for the perfect interface for it. So I'm sure that will arrive at some point.

And I found that you gave your product, and this is a question for you, Kel, I'm sure in the next five years it will take off. What other exhibitions do you want to attend this year?

Yeah, so we have our event pipeline prepared, as I mentioned earlier. I think the best way for you to kind of follow along is to follow our socials. And we're always posting pictures and announcements of where we're going to be. So yeah, follow us and you'll be the first to know.

Question for you, Simon, on Epidemic. Can you tell us anything about the pricing of Epidemic Sound integration? Will free users get some access? Will tokens be involved?

Free users will get access to some tracks through tokens. Everything will be token-based. We haven't set the price yet for the different. There'll be two types of license. There'll be personal licenses and commercial. They will be very affordable for people and we'll set them at the price which is appropriate for the production that they're making.

Yeah, it's a big opportunity for us. Steven, a question for you. Can you summarize where we are with the codec development in terms of versions and capabilities?

Yes, so we're quite well advanced on Blackbird 10, which is the new one. The existing version we did improve a bit last year for Blackbird 9. Blackbird 10 is full 1080p. The research we've had is that most people's video windows are not actually 1080p yet, but that will improve, and particularly as we get more of the higher end users as we add these extra features. So we've had a lot of progress moving to the GPU, which was one of the big steps we've made, and also integrating with all the features of Elevate and the GPU. So we have a version that seems to work completely reliably as of a couple of weeks ago. So that's good. And now it's a question of going through and optimizing the compression and improving the quality on the rogue videos. So we're broadening the range of videos. I've done my first demonstration actually to Mike at a meeting and I showed him Elevate running in Blackbird 10 and he was, you know, he just didn't notice. I didn't tell him it was Blackbird 10, but he could see the big pictures and he didn't criticize it. which is a good step that someone just coming to it just accepts that it's HD. So that's, you know, we're starting to get to that point. So yes, it's just a question of more and more testing. We're very near the point where we'll bring in outside users, people not in the company to help put their content through and test it. So obviously we welcome anyone for that. And there'll be a bit of publicity surrounding that just to get the people in.

There's three or four questions, actually, to you on the player and capabilities around that. And I don't know who wants to answer those questions, but... I can start. Yeah, so any updates on the player... Yeah.

Okay. Well, Todd, let's make some general points. So you can actually access the player. It's very well hidden in Elevate because Elevate is not yet at the point where we're getting into distribution. Elevate's focusing on the post-production, the editing side of things. But we use it for testing and we use it for development still, as we have done. There have been, from Animate, about 900 videos published and about 15,000 to 15,500 views, I think. So it is there. It works. You can publish your next on Facebook and, you know, in comments in YouTube and things like that. But it's not the main thrust while we're busy finishing off Elevate, completing Elevate, because the customers we have are using Elevate for editing and creation rather than for distribution at the moment. It is very convenient if you want to share things because it publishes almost instantly and you don't need a password to look at the videos. whereas obviously Elevate is very secure, so you'd need a password for that. So I think it's there, we keep it working, and it's very useful for development, and its time will come.

Thanks, Stephen. There's a really nice question here on annual sign-ups. Annual sign-ups are a huge endorsement. I've seen this in another company where monthly subs would drop in and out, which would add friction to admin costs as well as fluctuating revenues. So for how long have annual subs been available? That's since the end of January, so it's still very, very early in terms of that. And of the 388, roughly how many are now annual subs? Again, we're looking at all these detailed numbers at this stage. What we would say is over 10% of them have been annual subs, and that's a really good sign. So we are, yeah, we're really happy with the two. When will the product market for this stage end? You must have an idea. We run over a no, and I tell you, we feel that the metrics are starting to look up for us in the green shoots, but it's too early to say that there's going to be a particular day, week, or month at this stage. You've created an amazing video editing technology and totally understand how complex it is to find an affordable, successful route to a rapid market growth within a shortage route. Well done for the efforts and determination. Thank you. Thank you, Philip. A question, have you done any work on what a sale or partnership or a large strategic might look like at this stage as a fiduciary exercise of organic solar rollout if the product is challenged? Well, at this stage, we're capitalized, we're working on a partnership strategy. We have a roadmap. At this stage, no, we're not working at any buyout at this stage. I think you have a brilliant team and product and a paid subscriber to Elevate and a shareholder. I'm a bit surprised by the low regularity of mail blasts to your 138,000 subscriber list. It sounds like one of your questions, Kel. I see one of the roles of Elevate is to inspire its users to generate more and better video web and just announce new features. Can more be done in this regard?

Yeah, yeah, sure. No, it's a good question. So we want to make sure that whenever we email our user base that we have a valuable message to give them. Because from experience, if you're spamming people, you're going to lead to a lot of unsubscribes. We don't want that. And the other thing is that we also have targeted email blasts. So we also use our internal usage metrics to target specific groups of people. So you might not be receiving all of them, depending on how you use the product. But yeah, I mean, there's always more that can be done. Obviously, we're a marketing team of three people. We're doing a lot of things. And email is definitely part of that. And we think that consistency is really important. And we do believe that we've had that consistency going as the product launches new features and functionality.

Thanks, um, question, uh, another. Another ask on stats, which I'm not going to answer, but, um, the, the, you mentioned the sure Alice test of 30% threshold needed for product market fit. How are you scoring on that? We're improving. We're improving every day. I think is the way whenever we're not at it. Um, I think also that might be slightly. You know, maybe not the right metric for us. And I think 30% not being able to do with Elevate, you know, before we pressed the button on marketing is probably a bit too high. But yeah, we're progressing well. Question. The problem you have is the market is focused on paying customers. Until there is a significant increase, share price will go nowhere and a need to raise more funds. You're in a difficult situation. Would it be wise to have more frequent updates to take up numbers, which are hopefully good to encourage new and take up numbers to encourage new investors? Yeah, it's a good point, and it may be some good advice that we should have more regular updates. As I said, we're in an experimentation phase right now, and so those metrics do move about. And I would not want to say commit to giving a number every week or every month, but may well change the following month. We feel that when the revenue engine moves to a point where the maths really make sense, that that will be a point where the money should follow. I mean, sense of money should follow. So that's what I'll say to that. Would some answer, has he sold any shares he purchased?

No, not since the last time he spoke, no.

The T01 undisclosure is clearly a pain point and could be seen as market abuse as the market does not know if the individual is still a holder.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think I can say any more on that. We can only release information that we receive ourselves and we're abiding by all the rules.

And it shows up for the player performance, the video, when our video export took 12 seconds compared to 16 minutes of conventional export. That's a big deal. Thank you very much for that comment. Excellent. I'm on question number 65, by the way. I think we're nearing the end, but it's near the end. So if you've got any more questions, now's the chance. Did you test your equipment prior to this important presentation? Your sound quality has been terrible throughout. Oops. It isn't a good look, bearing in mind our sector. Okay, noted. Is the marketplace still on for a Q2 launch question summit? Is it for a Q2 launch? I guess it must have been in a previous roadmap.

for marketplace.

Oh, sorry, for marketplace. No, no, we've never said it'll be Q2 the marketplace. No, that's never been stated as. We do have the tokens, though, which allows you to spend your tokens. Yeah, but third parties, not for third parties.

We've got third party integrations that are coming in now. We've already got, obviously, the OpenAI integrations. Now we've got epidemic sound integrations. And so much talk to you through the integrations that are going to happen in the next three months. So, yeah, that's the start of it. Great. Jake, we've reached the end of the questions, I think.

Thanks, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you for addressing all of those questions that came in for investors this afternoon. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you afterwards. But Ian, perhaps before, really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.

Yeah, absolutely, Jake. I mean, I would say this is a very exciting time, as I've shown this morning, with further faith in the product and the team to deliver product market fit. We've been very straightforward with you guys, very transparent. And I hope that's appreciated. We will continue to be. And we're really very excited about the opportunities ahead of us. Thank you very much.

Perfect. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Blackbird PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.