Blackbird plc

good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the blackbird plc interim 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 just 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 we'll publish our responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin we would just like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to the team from Blackbird plc. Ian, good morning sir.

Good morning Jake and good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Blackbird's interim results 2026. Before I kick off, I would just like to introduce my fellow team members. We have Ness, who I think you all met at the AGM. Ness is from ScaleUp and is our fractional chief marketing officer. Stephen Streater, company founder and inventor of Blackbird. And here we have Sumit Rai, who is our chief product officer, and as of today, our new board member. Graz Summit. Right, let's kick off. So before I start, I'd just like to address a few things. Firstly, last time, we had some sound issues. And I want to make sure that we don't have that again. We've actually got a volunteer developer slash sound engineer here in the office with us to make sure that that doesn't happen. And we are monitoring this as we go through the presentation. So if you are experiencing any sound problems, please let us know. The second elephant I will address is the cash situation. So I know that a lot of you are concerned about that. Of course, we are monitoring the situation very carefully ourselves. But let me just remind you of our strategy around our revenue. We're building a revenue engine. And with that, we want to make sure that our revenue engine is starting to make economic sense. That is that every user that we acquire, every subscriber we acquire, has a lifetime value that starts to be equal or greater, much greater than that acquisition cost. And our focus really still is on marketing teams. And Vanessa will talk you through why marketing teams are incredibly valuable to us. but also product-led growth and variety often is kick-started by the masses and therefore we will continue to fill the funnel with those early creators and students etc at the top of the funnel. So that's really important to note. So as you go on to the first slide here, I think that we put some numbers out in August that now have been improved further on as we get to the end of September. And this really tells you the story of how our conversion metric is improving. So our subscription growth in Q3 is going to be estimated around 235%. And the key numbers here are the fact that this has improved from back in March, where we were converting at around 1% for every new user coming in, every 100 users coming in, to 2.4% at the end of June. And now, as we go to the end of September, at around 3.4%. together with that we've also reduced churn down to 11% of course things are always moving around but that's a really good number to look at and that's actually led to our ARR improving from June at around 30,000 to end of September at around 90,000 again these are really small numbers we're very well aware of that but it can be you can see that we're starting to get that exponential growth and that revenue engine is starting to take shape We're also seeing that in the sector that we're really focused on, as in the marketing teams, that although virality and product-led growth is yet to be proven, we're seeing growth in the rate that people do share and therefore the superior ARPU and retention in the group that we're focusing on. So I'll come back at the end of this presentation, but I'm going to pass over to Sumit now to talk you through our product improvements.

Okay, so everyone knows that this year has been a huge year for product development. We know that at the end of last year, whilst we were available, obviously, as a product to the market, we still had a lot of important things to add. And a huge factor as to why our conversion ratios have moved this year, and you can see that massive growth, you know, from the one to 3.4 is a lot to do with obviously product that is available. So people who income There's all of a sudden more reason for them to actually convert pay for the product because there are features which are often behind a paywall, but also features that are just generally available within the product. Some massive things that we've added already this year, obviously the epidemic sounds work that we did in bringing a really best of class sound library to the market. We also improved our font support, so not only adding thousands of fonts, but also providing custom fonts available to users. We improved the AI side of the product with things like voice isolation, which is a really crucial tool for people producing any kind of content. We also introduced color grading, and this has become a really popular feature for the product, which was already on top of the existing LUTs and looks that we already had. We also began the beginning of our animation work and this is a really important thing which we'll come on to a little bit later because we have done a lot of work behind the scenes on the engine and we'll discuss this. We also added some really important features which you don't see very well or very often or done well even in NLEs, which is things like the project recovery. We think it's a best of class system. You're being able to go back and look at where a product was, especially in a multiplayer environment, because one of the fears that people have about multiplayer is what happens if another user comes in and alters something which has already been done. Well, we have a great history in the products that you can roll back at any point. We also changed and tweaked the plans. We obviously learn as we go along and we're able to analyze what people are buying into what levels and we've made little tweaks along the way and obviously with pricing but also with what people can do but you know we're in a good position we are definitely at a point as we said in the summer where this is a very very usable product and so that's why we're now experiencing our growth but obviously it's only still the beginning of the longest story and the things which are coming next are going to be really exciting a major thing that we've done this year and a lot of the work done through Stephen's team also with the Dace Bay Elevated Element team is to really improve the way the engine is capable of handling more than just video we're known for our ability to handle video but we have added the ability to do graphics and text now at a much much higher level. You saw a snippet of that earlier this year in the AGM where we demoed some of our effects work which is all going through our pipeline at the moment. By being GPU accelerated we're able to bring desktop capability to our online experience and that's a major major advancement. We've always led the way with video but now we're going to be able to actually also jump ahead and be on par with things like some of the bigger products in terms of how we can handle texting graphics so i'm going to give you a little demo in a minute of some of that but that's only just part of it we're also doing a whole bunch of work on integrations so things like youtube upgrade some good quality of life features like view only users because we want organizations who use our product to be able to and have people who can come in and see the product. It's how we use other products. Not everyone is a creator, but a lot of people are stakeholders. So we want to introduce and make this a real team product. The other thing that we're doing is expanding the ability to get content into the system. At the moment, you can upload by file from the phone or from the desktop, but we do live in a wider ecosystem and we're expanding that the same way that we're expanding how you can output to things like YouTube, but also how you can get content into the system. The eventual goal for that goes down to cameras directly, but in the interim, there are other things that we will be able to support. Other platforms will be able to support to send video content directly to us. And then a really important feature, something which has been a growing market, something that I've spent a lot of time in the past working on is things like webcam capture. So being able to allow people to create content directly from the desktop as well, things like that are coming. and audio effects, which we know that we have a need that we haven't fulfilled yet. So coming into some of that exciting stuff that we've done, I want to give a demo of the up and coming bit of product that we have within our system, which is the GPU accelerated graphics engine. So this is something that you'll be seeing come to the platform soon. It's work that we're doing where we're actually going to not just take text, which we've had historically, and it's been capable, but it has been a simplified version. But we're actually bringing a very, let's just say, desktop level capability to that. So it doesn't just mean being able to do text in the way that you would expect to use text within sort of a desktop publishing product or something like that. But it also, and this is the exciting bit, also means that we're able to take text and be able to create a whole bunch of presets that people could use to get started with their content. So if, for example, I take that trumpet in, you'll see that it's a really nicely animated piece of text. But also, it means that you can go in there and you can change any of the things. So let's just call this nice. And then this one can change there to easy. like that. So things can be changed very easily, but also the controls and the very, very fine control that we have for every bit of how that animation works, its positioning, the color schemes that go with it. All of these can be easily adapted. And where they're best used is things like lower thirds. So we're allowing users to directly drop on a little lower third. Maybe there's another one we can add. Ian McDonough, Stephen Bernard Streater Ian McDonough, Stephen Bernard Streater everything that we're doing here has a very, very, very desktop-like feel. And all of that's been made possible. We've done it with video, but we're now doing it with graphics and text. And we believe that this is going to put us really not just on par with what happens with some of the bigger NLEs and desktop products, but actually text is traditionally done quite badly. And it means that a lot of the time people have to rely on visual effects tools like After Effects to do this sort of more complex animations. We're bringing that experience directly into the browser and obviously more available to people because our product is a easier to use, more available product to the market. So that's our roundup of products. Over to marketing.