Kubient, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Kubian's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. Joining us for today's call are Kubian's founder, chairman, chief executive officer, chief strategy officer, and president Paul Roberts, chief financial officer Josh Weiss, and president of agency and brand partnerships Michael Kalman. Following their remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Before we get started, I need to alert you to our safe harbor statements under the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, including statements related to future events or to our future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Listeners should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond our control and which could and likely will materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy, and liquidity. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. Furthermore, listeners are referred to the documents filed by Kubian Inc. with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, filed with the SEC on March 30, 2021, our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the first quarter of 2021, filed with the SEC on May 14, 2021. Our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2021 filed with the SEC on August 16th, 2021. And our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2021 filed with the SEC on November 12th of 2021, with the understanding that our actual future results may be materially different from what we expect, which include these and certain other important risk factors. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements. Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason or to update the reasons. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Please refer to Kubian's SEC filing, specifically its registration statement on Form S-1, initially filed on December 12, 2020. for a more detailed description of risk factors that may affect the company's results. During the call today, management will discuss adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, and the company's press release and filings with the SEC, both of which are posted on the company's website. You will find additional disclosures regarding this non-GAAP measure, including a reconciliation of this measure with its comparable GAAP measure. Non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation form in isolation from a substitute for or superior to gap results. The company encourages you to consider all measures when analyzing its performance. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Paul Roberts. Thank you, sir. Please proceed.

Thanks, operator, and thanks to everyone who has joined us today.

The fourth quarter marked the end of a transformative year for Kubian as we continued to make progress in positioning ourselves for success amid the changing demographics in the modern advertising industry. Though there have been some macroeconomic and geopolitical issues that affected the world economy during 2021, we were able to garner many encouraging wins and have set ourselves up for an even more exciting 2022. A key highlight to mention is that we beat our revenue target for the fourth quarter and full year by achieving approximately $850,000 and $2.7 million, respectively. This is the result of our continued execution across a multitude of fronts within our business, and we are just getting started. Further propelling our growth trajectory was the acqui-hire of Media Crossing, which we'll discuss in further detail later on in this call. Additionally, if not for the disclosed legal settlement and associated legal fees incurred towards the tail end of Q4, we believe that we would have also hit our overall cost and EPS target. I'll pause there and refrain from further commenting on the financials, as our CFO, Josh Weiss, will cover that topic in more detail. But overall, I believe that our organization is moving full steam ahead, both from an operations and financial standpoint. Despite the numerous external circumstances outside of our control, there are tailwinds that illustrate the growth of the digital advertising industry, which is a big encouragement. In particular, a recent study published by Salesforce estimated that 60% of customer interactions will take place online in the next five years of commerce, a rapid acceleration from the reported 49% in 2019. We believe that the increasing need for effective advertising spend has never had such a bright and growing spotlight. further illuminating the need to cut fraudulent and inefficient advertising engagement. With the total addressable market rapidly growing, we intend to ramp up operations to expand our footprint and capture as much market share as possible. In order to execute this goal, we've had to and will continue to bolster our roster of talented employees. For example, we hired Mitch Berg as our new Chief Technology Officer in late November 2021. Mitch brings more than two decades of technology, engineering, and executive management tenure to the Kubian team. His tremendous industry knowledge and experience in scaling advertising technology businesses made him the ideal candidate as we look to enhance the capabilities of our solutions and ultimately ramp up commercialization efforts. Mitch has already put into place industry-leading practices for our development strategy, and the announcement of his joining Kubian has already attracted some incredible talent interested in working with him to accelerate the next generation of online digital advertising. As I've mentioned in the past few earnings calls, supply continues to outweigh demand in the job market. Nevertheless, our human resources team has meticulously handpicked and will continue to do so individuals that are not only great on paper, but are a great match to the culture of what our organization is looking to be. That said, I'm pleased to share that we now have a total of 38 valued employees and we're growing each month. However, as was iterated in the past, we have had contractors based in Russia. Due to the current international environment, we have decided to no longer work with any contractors based within Russia and have canceled all contracts with such Russian contractors that remain in the country. Given the circumstances, we recognize that we must be a fluid and nimble organization and focus on controlling the controllable. With that said, Mitch has been able to replace those contractors with additional resources here in the United States without experiencing any drop in development progress or platform performance. In addition to organically hiring, we have been very successful growing our team by way of M&A. making the quality of employees of an acquisition target a key criteria in our ongoing search. M&A has borne great fruit for our personnel expansion and comes in handy during these times where competition for skilled labor has never been stiffer. This inorganic growth strategy is and will continue to be a key pillar of our go-forward strategy, bolstering our vertical and horizontal growth in the advertising ecosystem. A shining example of our efforts on the M&A front has been the acquihire of Media Crossing, a company that was previously engaged in the business of providing digital media services to agencies and brand advertisers. Michael Kalman, the former CEO and co-founder of Media Crossing, will soon take the baton from me to speak further to the role he's playing in expanding Qubient's Managed Services division. Later, I'll go into greater detail on our operational updates leading into the new fiscal year and discuss our valued and evolving partnerships. But for now, I'll let Michael take the floor. Michael?