Nextech3D Ai Corp

All right, welcome inside our Vancouver Broadcast Center here at Proactiv for another live stream event, and this time with Nextech3D.ai. And joining us is the CEO of the company, Evan Gappelberg. And Evan, it's great to see you again. How are you? We're just losing your audio there, Evan, for some reason. We've got to get your audio taken care of, so we'll take care of that. And we'll tell you that we are here today to talk about Nextech3D.ai's financials that came out recently and also about some of the things that they'll be doing in the future as they sort of transition the business a little bit into where they were in the last few years to where they are going to now. And Evan's going to talk a lot about that. Also, recent acquisitions as well, Eventdex and also Crafty Labs. Evan will talk about how that changes things and what the next step is towards trying to put this all together. So, let's see if we can get Evan back on. Ears now, Evan? No, we're having some technical difficulties with your microphone. So, we're going to try to get that all taken care of, Evan. The modern technology, that's what happens when these things go. I can see you attempting to put your microphone on. How about them? I can hear you now. Yeah, just to turn it up a little bit. You should be good. So how are you? I'm good. Sorry about that. That's all right. No problem at all. Good to see you again, as I mentioned, and welcome once again to another live stream event here at Proactiv. And again, we are with CEO Evan Gappelberg of Nextech3D.ai. And so, Evan, first off, I thought I'd give you an opportunity just to say hello to the people that are watching. And we always encourage questions from people as well if they want to log those questions on. We've had a number of them asked already. But just overall, your thoughts on where you're seeing as far as your financials are concerned.

Well, I mean, we reported a very strong quarter, but Q3 wasn't just a strong quarter. It really was an inflection point for our company. We delivered 59% year-over-year revenue growth, 20% sequential growth. That's our second quarter in a row of 20% sequential growth, record 95% growth margins, all at the same time. It's a pretty powerful combination. You know, I don't know that we've ever been able to report a trifecta like that where we've had the gross margins, sequential and year-over-year growth all coming through at the same time. And so what you're seeing, you know, what I'm seeing is the beginning of a new sustainable growth curve as our unified system AI platform, our event platform gains real traction with enterprise customers. And I just want to stress that enterprise is the main event here. We are doing business now with the largest companies on the planet, including Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Deloitte, General Motors, and many, many, many others, you know, Spotify, Dropbox, Pinterest. And so all those customers are. Our customers that we're now talking to about enterprise contracts, and we have multiple enterprise contracts that are just literally waiting for the ink to dry. You know, we expect them to come in in the next week or two.

So, Evan, let's take a step back here and let's sort of, I don't want to give a whole history lesson, but let's talk a little bit about last year and really what happened last year and sort of led you to this. This has been sort of a transition that you've been making with the company in order to get to a place where you think you could be sustainable and move forward. So why don't you sort of take us back through some of the vision that you saw and where you see things going now?

Yeah, I mean, this is truly a story of a turnaround to take off. where a year ago, you know, we were kind of left for dead by investors. I mean, let's be honest, you know, the stock was at the bottom of the barrel and we were exiting out of our Amazon contract, which was, you know, where we made 3D models for Amazon that was a multimillion dollar contract. And so there was a lot of soul searching that went on. And what we realized is that we had AI, which is transformative technology. And we had a very, very strong position in the event space with Map Dynamics. And, you know, they have 500 plus customers. And so what we decided to do was to build out that platform and, add more features and more functionality. And then we decided, you know what, why build it when we can buy it? And so we acquired EventX in late 2025. And once we acquired EventX, it gave us the ability, you know, we basically acquired a portfolio of clients and uh plus a full tech stack which includes badging ticketing uh trade show app um ai matchmaking which is a very big deal we could get into that in a minute um and so that plus our our map dynamics event floor plan gave us this end-to-end one-stop shop solution that we never had before And then, you know, we optimized and added AI into the mix so that, you know, we can have very strong margins. And the business started to turn around. And then, Steve, you know, as luck would have it, Crafty Labs showed up on my radar and we were able to acquire that business. And that's going to really put more wind in our sails for 2026. That wasn't a 2025 acquisition. That was 2026. And we're looking at acquisitions now quite differently because AI is really a game changer. It does allow us to make acquisitions faster. that are additive to our company where those companies might be struggling. We acquire them. and we're able to streamline them we're able to add ai uh so you know you might have 40 people that we can run a business with four people and instead of having um you know those other 36 we just use ai agents so we have like an army of ai agents that that take the place steven so that's kind of you know, where we sit today, where we're using AI massively and it's going to be more and more and more a part of our story. And that's why we call ourselves an AI first company, because without, you know, the AI, we probably wouldn't even be here today.

Yeah. Talk to us about Crafty Lab because for people not familiar with it, what did you see in Crafty Lab that you thought was a really nice fit to what you were trying to build with Next Tech?

Well, I mean, Crafty adds something that we didn't have. So as I said, with EventX and MapD, we had Expo and Live Event Tech. We had the full end-to-end one-stop shop solution. With Crafty, we now have virtual experiential events as well as live kitted experiential events, essentially team building. And as it turns out, Steve, every single large corporation in America and the world has a budget for team building. It really goes down to, you know, employee retention, right? How do you keep your employees engaged? when they're spread out across the globe how do you make them feel like they're part of a very big company and so these these platforms you know crafty offers team building so you have mixology uh you know you're making cocktails with your with your co-workers you you know you have a chocolate making class you have a candle making you have trivia uh we've done trivia here at next tech actually virtual trivia, it's a blast. It's fabulous. It's so much fun. Here's a good example on like Crafty. And I've said this before, but I'll say it again. Growing up, I used to love recess. You know, who didn't love going out and playing with your friends? And so, but when you grow up, recess goes away. And So you go to the office just like you used to go to school, but there's no real interaction with your coworkers. So think of Crafty Labs as that platform that allows you to have that recess, and that is a lot of fun, and it does build camaraderie and teamwork. And so that business – We see massive, massive upside, too, because it started out, Steve, just as I described it, experiential. But we recently announced a gifting component to that. So it's the same, you know, HR person that's now ordering gifts for their employees or for corporate customers. Now they're doing that through the Crafty portal. And we're adding off-site events, which are potential multimillion dollar off-sites where, you know, you have 50 or 100 of the top execs that travel to Hawaii or some other remote exotic location. And they hire Crafty to put together the entire event from the flight to the airfare to the hotel to the food and all of that is something that we can do now. And so when you look at Crafty, it's a way bigger platform than when we acquired it just six weeks ago.

Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about companies you mentioned that you're working with. Crafty had its own client list when it came to you. And these type of organizations are so big, so widespread, so around the world that the type of events that you're talking about are something that they, it's not if they want to, it's they have to, in essence, do these events.

Yeah, and it extends beyond these big companies. So, yeah, our clients now are Google, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, General Motors, BNP Paribas, Deloitte, just, I mean, all the Fortune 1000 companies. They're all... doing these types of events on the Crafty platform. And we're talking to them now about enterprise contracts and really getting a bigger share of their wallet. And so when you think about government organizations, Steve, We're also talking to them because they're spread out. They have a massive size, just like a Google, right? Google is basically the size of a government. And so or government's the size of a Google. And so, you know, we're talking to governments about the same thing.

Okay. You mentioned that you're looking at other acquisitions as well. I know you can't get into too much details, but is it augmenting what you already have, or is it adding things that you think you need to have in order to move forward?

So, amazingly, on the tech side, Steve, I think we're done pretty much. Like, AI is going to be the only thing that we develop in-house. We don't need to acquire that, but We're looking at adding more and more, I'm just going to call them modules or potentially customers to our base, right? We just want to have... a bigger slice of the pie. And so we're looking at companies in the same space or companies that are just adjacent to us. We have a lot of .orgs, associations. So there might be a company that we're looking at that works with associations. You know, the events industry is quite fragmented. And so it gives us an opportunity to kind of roll them up

uh under the next tech banner and integrate them into our ecosystem and really just acquire more and more uh clients more and more revenue and then optimize that with our ai okay uh just on clients uh we've got a question here um you mentioned active engaging 200 enterprise customers what's the real estate breakdown over the next 12 months tier one two two three and and how does that sort of apply to revenue

So, I mean, when you talk about Tier 1, 2, and 3, I mean, they're all Tier 1 and 2. I don't think there are any Tier 3s. Well, Tier 3, I don't know if this investor is talking about Tier 1, 2, and 3 as far as our pricing calculator because if he's talking about our pricing calculator – they're in all tiers, right? So as I've mentioned, I think that is what he's talking about. Tier one is like 25 to 50,000 and then tier two is, you know, 50 to I think 150 and, you know, tier three is above that. And so as we've mentioned, the way that these clients work is they start at one tier and then they move up the ladder so we're talking to all of them but you got to keep it this in mind um these customers weren't in any tier they were in no tier they were you know spending uh small dollars relatively small dollars multiple times a year. And so now we're actually putting them into enterprise contracts. That's the big news. Of course, we want $250,000 contracts, but I'll take $25,000, $50,000 contracts all day long because I know we can grow those into six-figure contracts.

And, Evan, on that, these companies that you're talking to and talking about are, as we mentioned, they're always engaging their employees. And there's so much demand for employees these days in certain companies. The companies are doing everything they can to hold on to employees, and especially the good ones they want to hold on to. And so now, as in the past it used to be, companies would say, okay, well, here's what we've got, and if we have any revenue left over, we'll do something with the employees. You know, like we'll do a pizza night or something like that. But now they're budgeting in their budgets large amounts of money in order to – for simply employee retention and employee engagement. And that's – I think that's the key to all this, isn't it? That these are not something that's just off the side of the desk. These are people who are specifically hired to make sure their employees stay where they are.

So it's the HR department and they're given budgets, annual budgets.

Big budgets.

Big budgets for, I mean, big companies have big budgets, you know, even their pencil budget is big at Google, right?

Fair enough.

Yeah. So it's all big, but they're basically coming to us saying, hey, I have 50,000, I have $100,000, how can I spend it with you guys? Give me a roadmap. Show me what you guys have. You know, let's have some fun. Let's build, you know, some experiences that are memorable. Let's do some team building. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better customer than that, right, where they're eager to buy. And they have a mandate to spend that money. And so they're just looking for a company that can give them the ROI. And so our whole thing is about data and analytics. And so in another week or two, Steve, we're going to come back on your show. And we're going to be announcing a new platform that has some very, very exciting data and analytics. And it's all AI. It's all, you know, on the Crafty platform play with the Crafty credits, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's a lot happening at Next Tech that's going to make all of this turn into a reality. There's a lot going on behind the scenes with me and my team. And we're going to be showcasing some of that the next couple of weeks. But, you know, we have the clients. Yeah. We're rolling out the platform. We have the product. We're really just executing at this point. And the 59% growth, Steve, is a clear sign that it's happening. It's not just talk.

Okay, another question from an investor wanting to know about ticketing and contracts, big players. And somebody else asked a similar question about, you know, Ticketmaster, StubHub, people like that. I know that we've talked about ticketing in the past, and in your brand of ticketing, how you do it is very different than what you're seeing there. So can you talk to us a bit about the ticketing part of the company?

Yeah, so what we're going to be doing, we can't just launch Me Too ticketing. Let's be clear on that. We will not win Me Too. So we're launching blockchain ticketing, as we've mentioned many times. Blockchain ticketing is our hero product in the ticketing market. And so we're beginning conversations. It is going to take a little bit of time, but we're starting to have conversations. with the big ticket masters and stub hubs and, you know, reaching out to them and getting them engaged and talking to, again, you know, agencies, government agencies about, blockchain and how we can use that for certification, not just for concerts, but beyond that. So there's a lot happening here. You know, we're trying to do it all at once. It's definitely a bit of a challenge, you know.

Fair enough. I get it. But more to come is what you're saying.

Yeah, more to come. It's happening. It's just, you know, it's in motion.

Okay. A lot of questions, Evan, about total revenue for the year, guidance, all that. From what I understand, I've interviewed many times, you have not said any guidance for the company, and that's not something you're prepared to do today, I don't think. But you're happy with where the sequential growth that you're seeing in the quarters, and you want to sort of build on that?

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm confident that we're going to show triple-digit growth in this year. I'm confident that there's going to be surprises to the upside, not to the downside. It is a little early for me to project the numbers, but it's definitely going to be way better than last year, which was the chow. And we think that this is really just the first year of a multi-year growth trend. Where it's that hockey stick and we're just at that bottom turning up. Right. But, you know, it starts to go like that. And so we're just at that first year. And this is really, you know, the first quarter that we can really talk about that.

Yeah. Let's talk about margins because that was a big part of your news release as well, talking about company margins. And I know there's been a lot of work put in by you and the team to try and get your margins to a certain point to where they are now. And it's significant. So, can you talk to us about margins and where they're at? And are you at the point where you can't improve on them anymore because your margins are quite high?

Yeah, I don't know that we can improve beyond 95%. You know, we can't, you know, get to 100%. But we are a high margin business because it's primarily been software that we're selling. So software is the highest margin business. You know, in the past, the 3D models, we were trying to get to pure software. We never actually made it there. We were like 50%. uh there but yeah because we're pure software because we've reduced our expenses uh those margins are very very high and uh we're very proud of that that the finance team's done an amazing job i do want to uh also i don't know if the the question has come up steve about um you know the acquisition of arway has that been uh

Yes, and as a matter of fact, that was my next one, next three to four months. So you're not one of 3D models as well, and just is the company sort of moving away from that? But let's talk about ARWay first.

Well, I will just – grab that 3D model thing. So we have some contracts that are ongoing with 3D models, but it's not big business. It's not millions. It's like hundreds of thousands, right? So we're just not focused on that because we're chasing after the tens of millions, right? And we just don't see that in the 3D modeling space. So It's still there. It's, you know, if it does take off, we'll be able to take advantage of it. But, you know, we did have Amazon and we weren't able to turn that into a sustainable business. So I don't know what's bigger than that. Right. As far as AR way, let's talk about that. Sure. So the deal is done, but there's always, you know, a but. The deal's done, but In order to get the regulators to approve it, you know, there's a process, and that process is we need to have audited financials for both companies. And Nextech is in its Q4 right now. So we're going to be auditing our financials anyway. We don't want to do two audits because that would unfairly burden the company with additional costs. And this doesn't make any sense for us to do an audit today when we're going to be doing an audit in six weeks. And that was the calculus over the last couple of weeks that we've been going through. Do we do the audit or do we wait? And so we decided to wait. because we just don't want to burn our precious cash paying auditors twice. And that's really the bottom line. So once the audit is done for Nextech, we'll be able to quickly move that acquisition into the done deal, you know. And so we're just waiting for our audit and then we move to close.

Okay. Let's talk about this year. And you mentioned the revenue in this particular financials is not related to Crafty Lab and only partially of Eventdex as well. So what are sort of the things that investors should look for in 2026 as you continue to build the product out and obviously really push sales?

I mean, there's a number of things. One is, you know, keep a lookout for M&A because we are hunting for new deals that would, you know, help us to grow even faster. You know, that's kind of... uh the turbo booster um but also you know the enterprise deals um are going to start to be announced soon and then you know for us it's really just executing on the business that we have uh landing and expanding uh into you know we already landed through acquisitions the biggest companies now we want to expand And so, you know, there's a lot happening. I can tell you that, that, you know, these government agencies are quite excited to be working with us. These large companies are quite excited to have a one-stop shop, these enterprise accounts. And, you know, we think a little bit out of the box. I'm not, you know, a techie. So I think in terms of just solutions. And I'm trying to find solutions for our customers that maybe other people haven't thought of. And I think there's some really good opportunities there. We're going to innovate. and offer some solutions that uh is unique to us is proprietary proprietary and so it's really steve about mining the gold mine that we sit on we have a gold mine we really do and now we're just mining it uh we're moving the equipment into place we're moving the people into place and uh you know the results are starting to show up in our quarterly reports

Okay. Let's talk about the blockchains. I want to just ask a question about that because I'm just wondering, in the process that you're building and soon to roll out eventually, has it been easier than you thought it was going to be, more difficult? What's sort of the process involved in trying to put something like that together?

I mean, it's definitely a process, but it's a high-margin growth engine. um for investors i mean global ticketing is a 100 billion dollar industry counterfeit and you know duplicate tickets unauthorized reselling scalping all of that is is a big issue and these are not edge cases you know this is like a structural flaw in the system and and blockchain ticketing really fixes this at the foundational level, each ticket becomes a unique, verifiable digital asset that can't be forged, duplicated or altered. And so, you know, there's trust, transparency and security all built into blockchain tickets. And again, it's not just tickets. It goes beyond ticketing. You know, some people think of it as just ticketing for concerts, but think of it in terms of like certification as well and there's a lot of certification that these you know big companies that we have as customers um need to do better at uh in terms of preventing fraud so um that that's kind of you know every ticket is uh so anyway we're we're going to do a demo of the blockchain ticketing again, in the coming couple of weeks. So get ready, Steve. It's going to be busy. You and I are going to be busy doing demos. I'm going to be bringing on my team to do screen shares and show how the tech works.

Okay. There's a lot of questions about obviously share price because people always talk about that. I know you've talked about that in the past. Share buyback programs, management, buying more shares, a lot of things about sort of the corporate-y side of things. So I'm not sure how much detail you can get into or if you, you know, I know you're bound by regulations of what you can and can't say. But just on, I know you're the largest shareholder of the company, I believe. So just for shareholders, you sort of want to talk to them directly and message them.

Yeah. Yeah, let's just be clear. I mean, it sucks when the share price is down. It really sucks. And I feel the pain. And, you know, I've been through this before, though, with Nextech. When we first launched Nextech as a public company, you know, the stock sat for a year in that 25 to 50 cent range. And then it took off. went to $1, $1.50, $2.50, corrected hard, and then it had a massive move up to $10. So I guess what I'm saying is that it's not for the impatient investor, but for the patient investor, I think this is going to be a very, very rewarding journey. I hope we all live long enough – You know, because it's been a bit of a roller coaster. It's been a while. I do, when I say I hope, I'm talking about rear view, people that have been in the stock since 2018, 19. But going forward, I think this is the year, the breakout year for the stock. I think that it's undervalued at the current share price. I don't just say that. I bought 550,000 shares in November at 14 cents Canadian. I think it's around the same price today. So you can buy at the same price that I bought it at. I'm considering buying more because it's, you know, dirt cheap, in my opinion, based on our growth trajectory and based on the fact that we're probably going to go cashflow positive this year. you know, sooner than people think, I'm quite bullish. So, yeah, I think this is just opportunity knocking. I know that when it comes to turnaround stories, everybody always, you know, like, really? You know, you do like that. You kind of look at it. You squint a little. You go, really? Is it really turning around? Well, the numbers don't lie. the numbers don't lie. And so when you have the kind of numbers that we showed today, and this is our second quarter of 20% sequential growth, it signals to me and it should signal to you, to our investors, that this is real. The turnaround has happened. And so we're just in that first quarter. And I think, as I mentioned, Q4, the next quarter, is going to be even better. So you can take that and run with it.

Okay. Lastly, I thought this was a really good question. It just popped up here a moment ago. And this is from, given your focus on discipline, growth, minimal delusion, do you expect the company can execute its plan with your existing resources? You also mentioned M&A. But if M&A doesn't happen, do you feel confident that you've got the things in place to execute on that plan you just talked about?

I do. The M&A is additive. It's like a turbo, right? We're going fast. We're going very fast. But the M&A just catapults. you forward even faster because you just you know instead of it taking you you know a year to acquire uh customers and build that revenue you know it happens in a day essentially right so uh that's the benefit of m a but we do have the resources without m a to continue and that is the plan if the right opportunity comes along we are uh you know comfortable with m a i mean we just made two acquisitions so i'm bringing it up because it's not something that that should be discounted right so it's something that you should actually you know think about um as as likely at some point uh in the future okay uh last word evan uh last final thoughts final thoughts are that you know Opportunity, you know, comes along every once in a while that, you know, again, you've you've watched me, heard me listen to me speak over the years from where I'm sitting today. this is a tremendous, tremendous opportunity to get in at the very, very beginning of a new multi-year growth curve that's driven by AI, that has blockchain wrapped around it, and that is in the event industry, which is a trillion-dollar global industry And we're doing, you know, a couple million. So when you think about the upside versus the total addressable market and you start to realize, like, there is no real limit to how fast and how far we can grow Nextech, it really does represent a tremendous, tremendous opportunity today for smart investors.

All right, Evan, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much once again for joining us on a live stream to talk about your financials and other things happening with the company and the look ahead for the rest of 2026 as well. So good to see you again.

Thank you.

All right, there is Evan Gapelberg. He is the CEO of Nextech3D.ai. And I'm Steve Darling here at the Worldwide Broadcast Center for Proactive in Vancouver. Thank you once again for joining us for a live stream, and we'll see you next time.