Banzai International, Inc.

We are seeing immediate results from having Videlo's next generation video creation editing and marketing suite and Open Reel's digital video creation platform in the Bonsai family of products. We achieved gross profit of $2.8 million in the quarter, an increase of 297%. Gross margin expanded significantly year over year from 64.7% to 82.1%. A few more highlights. We achieved annual recurring revenue of $14.9 million in the first quarter. This represents a 268% annualized ARR growth rate compared to Q4 of 2024. Adjusted EBITDA was a $1.7 million loss, which compared to a loss of $1.5 million in Q1 2024. Net loss improved by $4 million compared to Q4 2024. We acquired Videlo, a technology provider of video hosting and marketing suite solutions for businesses. We signed a definitive agreement to acquire Acton Software, an enterprise marketing automation platform provider, which is projected to increase FY 2025 revenue by $27 million on a pro forma basis and is subject to closing conditions. We completed a $20.3 million debt repayment ahead of schedule in Q1, which fully satisfied our outstanding debt obligations to several key vendors. We're extremely pleased to deliver this improvement in the balance sheet, which will also create a material benefit to net income for the full year 2025. Our customer base expanded to over 90,000 total customers. We launched Create Studio 4.0, the latest version of Videlo's award-winning video creation app developed by our Videlo subsidiary. We secured expanded agreements with RBC Capital Markets and other prominent enterprises for Open Real. This reflects our strategy of expansion in the enterprise and is an example of one of the key sectors where we are continuing to provide an increased value to customers. I just want to highlight again the milestone we achieved in fortifying our balance sheet, which is the $20.3 million debt we have repaid under our September 2024 restructuring plan. This has already delivered a meaningful impact to stockholders' equity with a $5.7 million improvement in Q1 and positions us for financial strength going forward. Moving on to our products. To date, we have consolidated three leading video assets within Bonsai, all of which help marketers leverage video to engage their leads and customers more effectively. These include our recently acquired OpenReel and Videlo businesses, as well as our Demio product, which we are using to deliver this webcast. So if you run webinars in your business, please check out Demio. Again, this consolidated business delivered revenue of $3.4 million in Q1 2025, which was a 213% increase compared to 2024. In January, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire Acton Software Inc. Acton is a leading marketing automation platform provider. The acquisition is subject to closing conditions, but could grow Bonsai's pro forma consolidated revenue substantially in 2025. We have substantially scaled our customer base to now over 90,000 customers, which covers some blue chip names across a variety of sectors. Some of our key customers and partners include RBC Global Asset Management, which we just expanded, as well as Cisco, Adobe, Thermo Fisher, Scientific, Microsoft, Dell, Capital One, and thousands of others. We serve a variety of industries, including healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, technology, and media, and we have customers in over 90 countries. 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 focus on acquiring stickier, high-value customers. Our flywheel business model continues to be at the center of our strategy. Developing great products leads to grown 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 are building a moat in two key areas, integrations and AI enablement. Integrating multiple products on a single platform allows us to simplify our customers' workflows and deliver on our brand promise of 10 times faster and easier solutions. Continued investment in AI enablement will ultimately be key to our long-term success. We believe that adding more solutions will, over time, expand the context available to us and will enable us to deliver more powerful AI capabilities. Our vision is to generate substantial long-term value by scaling inorganically in addition to the growth of our existing products. Our acquisition framework is centered around profitable businesses that align with Bonsai's target enterprise and mid-market customer profile and our data and AI driven strategy. We evaluate candidates on their ability to attract leads, engage, harness data and intelligence and measure results. The opportunity for Bonsai is twofold. First, to increase our product capabilities by acquiring strategically aligned products that serve our core customer base. And second, by accelerating our path to profitability and scale, and to hopefully benefit from multiple expansion along the way. I will now turn the call over to Alvin Yip, Interim Chief Financial Officer, to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Joe. Hi, everyone, for joining the call. So I would like to discuss our financial results for Q1 and the total revenue for the first quarter of 2025 was 3.4 million compared to 1.1 million in the first quarter of 2024. However, we believe the non-GAAP matrix annual recurring revenue or ARR is more meaningful in evaluating the company's performance. ARR was 14.9 million for the first quarter of 2025 and represents a 268% increase from the fourth quarter of 2024. Growth profit for the first quarter of 2025 was 2.8 million compared to 0.7 million in the first quarter of 2024. Growth margin was 82.1% in the first quarter of 2025 and increase of 1700 basis point compared to 64.7% in the first quarter of 2024. Total operating expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were $7.7 million, compared to $4.1 million in the first quarter of 2024. Excluding a $1.4 million of one-time expenses related to acquisitions, total operating expense totaled at $6.3 million in the first quarter and is an increase of 54% year-over-year. Net loss for the first quarter of 2025 was $3.6 million, compared to a net loss of $4.3 million in the first quarter of 2024. For the three months end March 31, 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of approximately $1.7 million, reflecting a decrease reflecting a decrease in the earning of approximately 0.3 million compared to a loss of approximately 1.5 million for the three months end March 31, 2024. This period-over-period decrease is primarily attributable to increase the gain on extinguishment of liability offsetting by loss of issuance of term notes and increased transaction related expenses. Now, I'm going to turn the call back to Joe for some closing remarks. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Alvin. Before I close, I'd like to review our 2025 forecast for our consolidated business. Our pro forma revenue for full year 2025 is projected to be $20 million, which would represent a 19% increase from full year 2024 actual revenue. Pro forma net income is projected to be $1.4 million in 2025, reflecting our transition to be a profitable company on a GAAP basis. We are still seeing solid revenue growth across our business at a much higher gross margin. Operationally, we're in a great position as we're positioned for cash break even operations in 2025. We have worked diligently to strengthen our balance sheet and advance towards profitability and long term growth. We have an expanding suite of synergistic products that drive real value for our massive customer base. Our business model, which is scalable and asset light, is positioned for triple digit revenue growth projection in 2025. We are focused on generating sustainable value for our shareholders, and I look forward to providing additional updates throughout the year. Thank you everyone for attending, and I would now like to answer your questions. Operator? Let me see. I'm going to actually go through and review the questions that are in the chat. So I'll just say, if you have questions that you would like to ask, if you can submit them to the chat, that would be great. We will see them come in here and we will address them. And I see a couple that have already come in. So I am going to start from the top and work my way down here. And I may loop in Alvin or Nancy as we go. So first question, is can you share any updates on the expected timeline for completion of the act on acquisition? Also, how is the acquisition pipeline looking for 2025 given the macro uncertainty? Are you seeing any signs of caution from your customer base in terms of marketing or demand generation budgets? OK, looks like that was marked as answered. I will try to remember what the full question was. But in summary, we are actively working on the Acton acquisition. That's about all I can say at this time. But we will continue to provide updates as we have them. And I will just say that we are continuing to move forward there. How is the acquisition pipeline looking for 2025? I'll just say from my perspective, I think it's looking great. We've obviously had a focus on getting through the process here with Acton. And so that has, I would say, hasn't stopped us from pursuing additional acquisitions, but certainly that's our priority right now. But I think there are a number of other attractive companies that have, you know, reached out to us or that we've reached out to and we're continuing to see a strong pipeline of interesting acquisition opportunities that I think would be a great fit for our business. And so, you know, although we can't provide any specifics around it right now, I'll just say the pipeline is looking really good and we're optimistic about what we'll be able to do with some of those additional But as always, when you're looking at acquisitions, you know, there are no certainties, you know, around will we be able to find deals that we love, you know, find businesses that we love, et cetera. But I think from a macro standpoint, there's definitely, you know, strong supply of companies that we're seeing come into the market right now. The second part of the question was around macro uncertainty. Are we seeing any signs of caution from our customer base in terms of marketing or demand generation budgets? I would say it's quite the opposite. I will tell you, I can't reveal the name of the customer. But in Q1, we had a large enterprise that had previously been on a maybe one or two year contract with us and renewed on a five year contract with us. We're seeing many of our customers expanding or renewing on longer contracts. And I think we're continuing to see strong demand and we've been seeing strong demand both in new and in the upsell side of things. So overall, I would say it's a very positive environment right now. And I think this is really being driven by, there is macro uncertainty, but I think that macro uncertainty is leading companies to think about how they can be more productive, more efficient, how they can leverage technology to enable that. And we are really well positioned to take advantage of that and to support customers in helping them make that transformation. So I think it's actually a very exciting time. Everybody's trying to get more competitive and offer a better level of service and a better level of communication with their customers. And we're very well positioned to help with that. So thank you for the questions. Let's see, has the sales cycle changed with recent macro and tariff concerns? Obviously, this is related to the prior question, but I would say no, we haven't really seen sales cycle change. We have seen some customers, especially larger customers, moving to longer contract terms. This has been a positive thing for us. There are opportunities here where we can lock in customers for two, three, five years. That provides obviously guaranteed revenue for us over that period of time. And of course, it's beneficial to the customer as well because it gives them price certainty, which is something that they care a lot about right now. So I think that a lot of procurement departments are looking to lock in longer term agreements where they don't have to worry about you know, potential, you know, inflationary pressures and things like that in the future. And we like that because it gives us more certainty in terms of our planning and everything going forward. Thank you for the question. Let's see. This question, are there any plans to become breakeven or cash flow positive in Q2? um i will say uh so there there are not liquidity concerns um to answer your question um i think we're we're fine from that perspective a lot of our cash expenses in q1 were as we said really one-time expenses mainly related to you know audit and legal expenses around uh acquisitions And as any of you who have been through this process know, it can be time consuming and cumbersome and expensive to go through that process. But you only have to go through it once. And so now, of course, everything can be reviewed and audited on a consolidated basis. And so that's much more efficient for us and dramatically brings that cost down for us. I think we're, you know, I won't comment as to, I'll stand by my prior statement that, you know, we're looking to reach cash flow break even in 2025. I won't give a specific commitment as to when, but I'll say, you know, we did make a major, major improvement. I think if you look at net income in Q1 as compared to 2024 or as compared to 2020 for Q4, both of those were major improvements. I think it was a $4 million improvement. So huge improvement there. And we obviously believe that we can continue that trend. Thank you for the question. Here's a question from Sandra. What conditions precedent remain to be satisfied to close the act on deal? It's really simple. It's financing contingency. We're working on it. We'll keep you guys updated as we make progress on this. So keep an eye out for that. Here's a question. Would you consider AI acquisitions in EMEA? Yes. And we actually did make an acquisition in EMEA. The Videlio business, as many of you know, is a London-based business. And we're definitely open to other acquisitions. I think actually EMEA presents some really interesting opportunities because I think there are a number of companies You know, EMEA has historically just not benefited from as robust of a tech capital market as the U.S., frankly. And I think, you know, from our perspective, that's a little bit of an advantage when you're there. You know, you can typically find, you know, similarly attractive assets, similarly attractive products, really highly high quality products, high quality businesses. Um, and sometimes the valuations can be a little bit more attractive and sometimes the, uh, you know, that, that makes up for a better deal. So I think, you know, that was the case with Modelo, for example, we were really pleased by that. So, uh, yeah, we will, we will, uh, continue to look, uh, at opportunities in EMEA and, uh, again, no, not making any commitments as to, uh, any future acquisitions, but definitely something we're looking at and part of our strategy. Thank you for the question. Let's see, you mentioned upcoming new partnerships at the last call. Can you say something about it now? Yes, I will say we have signed partnership agreements with several groups this quarter. I think some of them are still to be announced, but we're really excited about the progress the team has made here. We're focusing on partner enablement right now. We also have pending deals that we're working on with a couple of very large organizations, kind of in the channel, you know, VAR distributor side of things. So we're really excited about the progress the team is making here. Lee Firestone is heading this up. He previously was the CEO of Open Real. He's very focused on this. I think Lee's doing a great job. I think the whole team is doing a good job supporting him. Nancy and her team have done a lot to support Lee in putting those agreements together. So yeah, we're very excited to see how this works. especially with the inclusion of Acton, you know, if and when that happens, I think we'll be really well positioned to be able to, you know, I think Acton has a couple of really attractive channel partners they work with today that we'll be able to then fold in and vice versa, we'll be able to take that product into our new partner base. So I think this is a very high leverage activity, especially with a strategy like ours, because you can leverage those partners across a variety of different products. The more products you have, the more effective it can be. So we're really excited to see that come together. It's still new for us. I would expect to see more progress on this. We'll put out updates on this as we're making progress that we can share publicly, but very excited about what we've done so far here. So thanks. Let's see. Got a question here from Ed Wu. I think this is Ed Wu. It is. Hey, Ed. Ed asks, what is your AI strategy and benefits? Have you had to invest much more in R&D for AI in your products? um give a couple i'll give a couple real concrete examples um ed so i think the the the way that we think about this internally is we think about uh we we call these mario mushrooms okay so i don't know if you've ever played super mario brothers but you know in super mario brothers you run around you get the mushroom you get bigger you can jump higher maybe you get one that lets you shoot fireballs Maybe you get one that gives you the little raccoon tail and you can fly. There's superpowers that you get as the user when you get that mushroom. And we think about our products in those terms, right? What superpower does our customer get having that product? What does it enable them to do that they couldn't do before that helps them to be more effective in their strategy and growing their business? And so, I mean, a great example of this is Endymio, the product we're using right now. We have a feature we rolled out last year called AI Moderator that's been fantastic. This is something that comes with anytime you set up an on-demand or automated webinar, you can attach an AI Moderator to it. You can train that AI on your business, your presentation. You know, you're, you know, if you've got a nonprofit train on that, whatever the context is, you can train that AI. And it will then be able to join the chat anytime somebody joins that on demand webinar, whether it's four in the morning, or whether it's, you know, two in the afternoon, anywhere in the world, and it will be able to chat with them, and it'll be able to talk to them in their language. And it'll be able to answer their questions about your business. And that's super powerful. So that's something that, you know, previously you would have had to have a team of salespeople to sit by and, you know, wait for people to join that, be able to access that. We actually just published a piece of content about this. You can go to our YouTube channel and check it out. from one of our customers. But it's been a super powerful thing for a lot of customers where they, you know, I think the customer in question was a company in the Midwest US. And they used MEO for recruiting. And previously, they were doing three live webinars a day, they were able to turn this into automated webinars that they could just run all the time. And they were able to have the AI moderator answer questions and that tells them how they need to follow up on stuff. And so it dramatically reduces the amount of time that they have to spend on this. I mean, it takes it from hours and hours a day down to maybe 15 minutes to 20 minutes a day to just go through the leads, which is a tremendous superpower for that customer. Another great example is our Create Studio product. We just launched Create Studio 4. It has a ton of AI features, AI voice generation, AI image generation, AI video generation. It will build you based on the description of what video you're trying to build. It will pull scenes. It will build an entire thing for you. It will let you customize it. And then it will actually deliver a finished video that you can just take and publish. And it's just incredible. You think about the traditional barrier to creating and publishing video content can be days, weeks, months to produce a piece of video content. This allows you to do it in minutes. And that's just super, super cool. And it's a huge superpower for our customers then to be able to do that. And we like to think about this in terms of stuff that our customers maybe have always wanted to do, but they just couldn't do because they didn't have the ability to do it with either their knowledge or their resources or their staffing or their time or whatever the money that it costs or whatever. I mean, the Create Studio example is a great one because it can cost $20,000 to build a really high quality 3D video. But using Create Studio, you can do it yourself, you can do it very quickly. And it's only gonna cost you 500 bucks a year for an all access pass to Create Studio. So if you're interested in producing video, go check out create studio.com and take a look at that. Thank you for the question, Ed. There's many, many more examples, but I guess I should say one more thing about this before we wrap up, because I think that's the last question we have. You know, my view of this, my vision of this is that I think AI is going to completely eat marketing. I think AI is going to touch everything that can be done behind a keyboard and mouse in the next five years. But I think it will completely eat marketing. I think it's going to permeate every aspect of marketing. so our ultimate vision of this is you know having the uh tools that can create assets can create email campaigns can create videos can create webinars uh can create maybe ads and ad campaigns for you landing pages all this stuff can optimize that can test that but can also put together a strategy for you i think eventually marketers will be able to come in and say here's what i want to accomplish i want to launch this new product to my existing customer base you know go pull my customer list uh you know write my emails for me you know build my webinar content for me set up my webinars set up my schedule run the webinars for me you know build videos build my landing page and it will be able to figure out which pieces of that you need to engage as part of your strategy And it'll be able to go build out that content. And the marketer's job will really shift from being more of a creator and a manager of all this stuff to being an editor, right? Marketer will be able to go in and say, okay, yeah, you know, here's what I want to tweak about what this has produced for me. Um, and you know, I want to, here's what I want to do in terms of, you know, the business analysis, but they won't be so focused on, uh, on the details of the implementation itself. And I think that's going to be extremely powerful because today marketers get so much time sucked up by that implementation. And so our vision is we put more and more of these pieces together. So we integrate these pieces. it's gonna be to ultimately be able to leverage those tools as kind of, you can think of this as like the tentacles on an octopus, be able to go out and say, okay, great, we can reach into the email platform, we can reach into the webinar platform, the video platform, the lead database, the CRM, all these different tools, we can pull data down, we can push assets back up, we can create campaigns, we can do all this stuff. so uh we we're looking at all kinds of opportunities around that um sometimes we're looking at businesses that already have enabled some of this stuff i think acton's a great example they've made huge progress on that. Sometimes we're looking at, you know, businesses that maybe haven't enabled yet, but have that piece, you know, like Demio is a good example that we bought Demio, didn't have any AI features. We built those, but it had a great webinar platform. So we knew we could take that core webinar platform and build some really powerful AI tools on top. Create Studio, same thing. You know, it had some, had AI voice maybe, but it didn't have all the video generation features and things like that that we launched last quarter. So we're really excited to continue this strategy, because I think as we scale this up, the more solutions we get, the more problems we can solve, just the more powerful it is gonna be for our customers. So I think it's gonna ultimately, I think it's gonna be huge. And look, I think if you look at the financial results for last quarter, as Alvin said, we're seeing a really strong increase on just about everything, pretty much every single number uh improved last quarter and uh so you know hopefully that gives our shareholders confidence uh that we're heading in the right direction as a business and i think it gives certainly gives me that confidence um got one last question here uh from van thank you van any thoughts on share price uh yeah look i have lots of thoughts on share price i mean i i think it continues to be detached from from you know the reality of this business um to be perfectly honest that's my personal opinion Nancy probably won't like me saying that, but I think everybody's got to make their own decision about what this is worth, but we certainly have a couple of analysts that seem to agree with us. I think Ed has a much higher price target on the business. I know that Gaoshi has a much higher price target on the business. To be honest, I think we're trying to just do what we can to help spread the word, make sure that people know that we exist, make sure that people understand our story. I think that these Q1 numbers are obviously they're fantastic numbers. And, you know, hopefully when these numbers get reflected, you know, I think, you know, a lot of people have been just looking at the trailing cues. And, you know, frankly, they didn't paint a very pretty picture. I think now we're starting to see that picture show up in the numbers, be reflected in the numbers. And I think it's a much prettier picture. So hopefully as we start, and I think the analysts have known this for a couple of quarters because, you know, they're real smart people and they watch this. But I think, you know, now that the numbers are actually starting to get reflected and, and look, this will just hopefully continue throughout the year. But as the numbers are starting to get reflected, I think that we will, we will hopefully see continued improvement here. So, You know, and hopefully that will be reflected in the share price at some point. So, you know, you know, the market can be irrational. That's just how it is. Stock markets are like that. And, you know, we wish we had control over that. But I think, you know, what we can do is just continue to put up better numbers. Again, every every single number in here is a huge is a huge win over the year over year and the quarter over quarter pretty much so. I think we're going to just continue to deliver better results and hopefully we will see that start to reflect soon. All right. Not seeing any further questions. Let me go back to my script here. I want to say thank you all for joining the conference call today. I look forward to continuing to update you on our ongoing achievements, innovations, and growth. If we were unable to answer any of your questions, please reach out to our IR for MZ group. I will pull up their contact information here. Chris Tyson, reach out directly to them and they will be able to assist you. Thank you very much for joining the call today.