Nextech3D Ai Corp

Well good afternoon everyone and thanks very much for joining us. I'm Steve Darling from Proactiv here at our worldwide studios in Vancouver joining you for another live stream event this time with Nextech3D.ai and their CEO Evan Gappelberg and the company reporting recently their financial numbers which showed some of the best numbers they've seen in quite some time especially as far as the fourth quarter is concerned year-long Thanks for being with us on this live stream. Thanks, great, great to be back with you, Steve. Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar

We are now a very different company than we were 12 months ago. We've restructured the business, we've lowered the cost base, we've moved heavily into software, and we've integrated AI across our event tech platform. And now the numbers are starting to show that transformation. In Q4, we showed Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar Reza Davariar and 1% sequential revenue growth from Q3 2026 to Q4. That is, to me, the biggest sign that things are starting to accelerate quite rapidly. And that's really what investors should focus on is that this isn't just growth. This is acceleration. And really, the most important part of this, Steve, is we did not need to sacrifice margin to get here. Gross margin remained above 90%. That is not an easy thing to do. You're in business, Steve. I'm in business. Anyone that's in business, having a 90% gross margin is very, very difficult. So the story is very clear. Higher revenue, higher software margins, and lower cost structure. That is what a platform business is supposed to look like, Steve.

So Evan, let's talk about the revenue first in Q4. You mentioned grew three times your revenue, 216% is the actual official number. You said over 200, so I'll give you 216. Tell me a little bit about how the acceleration happened. What were the things that you needed to do in order to see that acceleration in Q4?

Look, it's very simple. The revenue engine is improving. We had a lot of customers, but they were buying in a way that was kind of hurting our revenue. We figured out how to A, increase prices without losing customers. That's like one clear way to generate additional revenue. But also we're signing multi-year deals. Now, multi-year deals are way more valuable than a one-year annual transaction. And so we're getting clients to sign multi-year deals, which means if you think about our business, if you were gonna buy our business from us, and all of our business was annual, you wouldn't know who was going to sign up next year and the year after that. But if you were going to buy our business from us and I said to you, Steve, we have three-year contracts with all of our customers, you know Reza Davariar Again, the main story is the revenue engine's improving, the margin profile has dramatically improved, and the cost structure is dramatically leaner, which I can give all credit to AI and to our CFO, Adam, who really has leaned out our company.

Yeah, operating expenses down quite significantly, in fact. And that is a big reason why you were able to bring the loss down as well, which I think is really important for investors to understand as well. So can you talk to me a bit about just that cost savings? And I know this has been going on more than just the last couple of months. This has been a process over the last few years.

Yeah, I mean, cost savings are in the rear view. Again, we're not focused on cost savings anymore. We've achieved that goal. Check the box. We really worked hard on that for multiple years. But I think the main event and the main question for our investors is, You know, where are we going, right? Like, what's the big picture here? And so if you think about that, Steve, AI is not a niche anymore. It's becoming an operating layer for Nextech and really all businesses globally. If you look at AI, I mean, it's exploding, right, in usage. And we're part of that story. AI is just gonna continue to grow. There's really no end in sight. But if you think about it, A company that's able to harness the power of AI like Nextech is a company that I think is going to grow very, very fast. And again, with a low cost basis for doing business. The second thing for investors to really look at is events. The global event industry is enormous. So you're talking about a multi-trillion dollar Reza Davariar, Evan Gappelberg, Belinda Tyldesley, Reza Davariar, Madison Wynsma, Hareesh Achi we sit at the intersection of two very large very fast growing markets ai which is probably the biggest technology shift of our entire lifetime you know bigger than the internet um really just i can't imagine anything that's going to be bigger and events which is a trillion dollar global industry now being digitized for the first time in 50 years this is really the opportunity that next tech is taking advantage of and this is really what investors should pay attention to.

There's obviously some questions that are popping up so I'll ask them as we go along the way and one is about where the company sits financially and just read it. 91% margin strong cash flow. Are you looking at any capital raises this year? Have you gotten to that point yet?

No, we are not looking at capital raises. In fact, if you look at the past year or even two years, we haven't done any real capital raises. We don't plan on doing capital raises. We worked so hard to get here where we can actually fund our business ourselves from the cash that our business is generating that we do not plan to raise any money. I mean, the hard part here was the restructuring. Right. I mean, we made difficult decisions. We had to let a lot of good people go. We reduced costs. We refocused the company. We moved away from lower margin work and we committed to software and this AI platform strategy. And now you're seeing the results, the impact. And so that's really, you know, very. It's a feel-good story really for me and it should be for our shareholders as well.

Let's talk about the point where you were able to get your margins over 90%, which is quite significant in a company like yours, a SaaS company. So can you talk to me a bit about the process there? Are you as razor thin as you're going to get on margins? Because over 90% is really quite an accomplishment. That's a lot of opportunity there for revenue in the future.

Yeah. We really weren't... If you think about it, there's not much more room for us to squeeze out of our business, right? We already squeezed $0.90 plus. I think we're at $0.92 of every dollar hitting our bottom line. So there's only $0.08 going into the month. It used to take us a team of 20 developers to run our platforms, to run our businesses. and now we're down to really three key developers. And so that is the story, you know, that we've been able, and that's not isolated to just developers. If you think of a customer success team, you think of AI being able to answer customer questions 24 seven, 365, no sick days, no, you know, Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, That's why everybody's investing trillions of dollars into AI. It's not a next tech story. I mean, look at all these companies like Oracle's laying off 30, 40% of their workforce. Meta is laying off 20, 30% of their workforce. Microsoft's laying off 20%. It's not because times are bad. It's because times are good. and they're just you know able to run the business with less overhead with less uh you know human uh cost and for us A lot of our previous business with Amazon, Steve, as you remember, used to be 3D modeling. And 3D modeling, even though we pushed real hard on the AI piece of that, we still needed to set up a business in India. We still needed lots and lots of human capital in addition to the AI to finalize and perfect the 3D model. That no longer exists. Now it's just software. We've built the platforms. So when we spin up a new event, all we're doing is programming the software to deliver the event the way that the customer wants it, but the platform's already built. Reza Davariar, 6 months or 12 months to build something new. Now it takes a couple, and it used to take a team of 20 or more, and now it takes us a couple of weeks to be able to build something, which is mind-boggling, right? And we're able to do that because the AI is doing 80 to 85% of the programming, Steve.

Yeah, Evan, there's another question here that I want to show, and this one's about how many customers expand beyond their initial deployment into your land and expand strategy. And I bring this one up because I think that's an important, because you had talked to the past about a lot of these contracts at the beginning are sort of show me contracts, see what happens. But the plan is to try and convert those into more expensive contracts and really longer term as it goes on, right?

It is, it is, and it's starting to happen now. Let's keep in mind, we built the platforms, we restructured, we got our costs down, we raised prices without losing clients, we made acquisitions. All those things happened in 2026, in 2025 rather. In 2026, we've been starting to do the hard work of developing relationships and upselling and cross-selling. But we really needed enterprise sales expertise. And so we've just recently hired two key players from Cvent, which is the multi-billion dollar biggest event tech company on the planet. and they you know the the two sales execs one had spent eight years there the other one spent three years there uh they wrote the book on sales for CVET and now they are building our book at Nextech and what's happening instantly is our deals are going from Let's call it $5,000 deals, which everyone knows is quite low, to now we're negotiating multi-million dollar deals not one but multiple and it's just beginning meaning these uh c-van execs only started with us in the last 30 days they're bringing their relationships and the event business is all about relationships they're bringing their book of business that they've built over a decade and that's why you know our business is really set to explode steve

Yeah. Evan, talk to me a little bit about the acquisitions that you mentioned. You mentioned Crafty Lab, obviously, and the Event Dex is the other one I believe you mentioned. Talk to me a bit about how those work within what you're doing, the ecosystem there, and their books as well that they brought with them, and how you're sort of able to generate new lists. Because I know you had hired some vice president of sales. You've got people that are trying to Take all those books, put them together, and then move forward.

Yeah. So think about it like this. There's really two platforms. One is Event Tech for live expos and conferences and trade shows. That's the MapD, Map Dynamics, does the exhibitor floor plan maps. and then you have Eventdex, which does the attendee registration, ticketing, badging, AI matchmaking, the app, et cetera. When you combine it into one platform, which is what we've done, you now have a full end to end solution that competes Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, A lot of the big companies contract to us for our mapping solution. They don't have maps. They don't have floor plan maps. Don't ask me why, but they don't. So they come to us and we wholesale to them, which is fine. So that's one part of our business, that end to end solution. The Crafty Labs piece is another platform that is experiential it's team building so that platform has you know over 150 different experiences whether it's a trivia game where you have you know different groups from a corporation like google or microsoft or meta who are our customers competing on trivia or whether they're doing some kind of candle making event, some crafty kit, maybe it's a coffee tasting, maybe it's a charcuterie board tasting and you have a live host. So if you think about that, that platform is adjacent to the live events. But what's happening now is we're starting to integrate, we're starting to merge them all. Reza Davariar So now all of a sudden, there's this whole additional revenue stream that we're starting to build. And there's some really, really exciting news coming, Steve, about a new product that we're going to be launching into the events industry using Crafty's Thank you so much for joining us.

Everyone talking about that. All right, this is a good question too. Blockchain ticketing, we talked about that in the platform. Tell me a little bit about the updates on that one.

Yeah, I was just on a call with a partner who is connected to the blockchain events industry. So if you think of blockchain ticketing, think about all the blockchain events that are going on worldwide. There's an opportunity for us to be there blockchain ticketing supplier for blockchain events it's obviously a natural it's a multi-million dollar opportunity and uh we think we're the only company in this space that that uh can deliver on that so yeah

Okay, another one here. Looking back a year from now, what operational metric, not the share price, because you really don't control how the share price works. And there's a couple other mentions about share price, and there's not much you can really say about the market is the market, right? But what do you think investors will say is the real turning point here for the company?

So investors should know, I'm not going to say buy now. That's not my role. What I would say is this. This is the moment to pay attention. Because the company investors are looking at today is not the same company they saw 12 months ago, even three months ago. And really, you know, again, I'm going to go back to the numbers. 200 plus percent Q4 year over year revenue growth, 90 plus percent growth gross margins, 275 percent gross profit. Thank you for joining us. More data driven, more automated, where does a high margin AI event tech platform fit in? and so we think that we fit in perfectly and we think that we're going to just continue to grow and scale our business look investors need to remember the old story was restructuring the new story is scaling the old business too much cost I'm the first one to admit that but The new business is software margins, 90%. The old business was way harder to scale. The new business is platform driven. The old story, fixing. I come on, you know, we're fixing. The new story is about growth, leverage, execution. That's why I'm so excited, Steve. I think we're still very, very early. I mean, the stock price hasn't even moved today. It shows that investors are asleep at the switch. But that is the opportunity. These things typically turn on one press release, one announcement of one new deal. that's a million dollar deal and all of a sudden the stock takes off.

Yeah. How do you attract new people with interest in the company? Who are you looking at? You mentioned you've got all these new opportunities with Crafty and other ones like that. So are you now, when you go out and are on the road and visiting people and stuff, you're seeing new people that you're talking to about seeing what the company's up to and how they would like to help support it?

So are we talking about investors?

Yeah, new investors, new people that are interested in understanding what the company is, how you've made changes. Because a lot of people may look at a backstory, and as you mentioned, it said, you know, we've been restructuring all that. But as you were pointing out, or at least trying to point out to people, that this is a story that's now building from this point on. So how do you get that message out to people who may not know that much about the company?

It's a good question. So everybody that's paying attention should know Been there, done that. Been there, done that. Meaning I already built Nextech into, you know, the stock was a $10 stock trading millions of shares a day. So I already have the playbook. We're going to be executing, meaning what it requires me to do is first have some numbers, which we first have the product, the numbers, the pitch deck, the presentation, something to stand on. I'm not going to go to roadshows. I'm not going to give investor conferences unless there's something to actually talk about. It's not about the sizzle. It's about the stake. And so now we have the stake. Right now we have it. We have the numbers that we can walk into a room and start showing around. So that's really All it comes down to is first, you got to have something to really show people. And the second thing is to just break out the playbook and start doing conferences and start doing presentations, which is going to gear up very, very rapidly from this point going forward.

Yeah, so Evan, on that, when you say show people, so is that consecutive to continue with numbers like this at a consecutive every time you're releasing financials, you're showing the revenue increasing? I mean, you're not going to get to the point where you're seeing the kind of numbers you saw now. I mean, you'd love to, but for sure. But is that what you mean when you show people is just continue to execute on what you've seen in Q4 and year ends and move forward?

I mean, we don't see any end in sight in terms of the growth. So we think that quarter after quarter, we're going to be able to deliver. And year after year, as far as the eye can see, there's nothing that's really blocking us from growing very, very rapidly into a much, much bigger company. And so if I think about that market opportunity, it's very, very large. You know, again, AI is estimated to become, you know, the biggest technology ever. You know, I can't even put a number on it. And if you think about the events industry, you know, again, it's a global industry that's over a trillion dollar industry today. So we're not going to capture the whole market, but we're focused on, you know, very specific opportunity areas. AI, automation, registration, ticketing, mapping, mapping. engagement analytics all into one event operating system and as we execute on that um you know we think it's worth billions i mean there's no reason why this can't scale into very very big numbers so you know i don't see anything blocking us steve from growing very quickly and and this first you know Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar, Reza Davariar,

Okay, what's your pipeline looking like this year? I know that we met your, you hired a new vice president of sales, I think it was. And so tell me a little bit about he's integrating into the company and what he sees moving forward as far as pipeline is concerned.

Yeah, so look, we have a million dollar plus, it might be a million and a half dollar contract that's working its way through contracting. It's not signed, sealed, delivered, but this is a relationship that our new enterprise sales leader brought with him and they are engaged. They've met multiple times in person, They're going to continue to meet until the deal is closed. And I'm actually going to be flying out to meet them and celebrate the closing of that deal. But that's one. There's going to be a parade of these hundreds of thousands and million dollar deals. And let's be clear, these are not one-off events. These are multi-year contracts. Two-year, three-year, four-year contracts. And again, those are very, very valuable, way more valuable than a one-year contract, which historically has been our business. And so, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, Steve, we did almost a million dollars in Q4, and now we have one deal that is looking like it's going to be even bigger than our Q4 number as a whole.

Okay, a couple of minutes left here. Evan, just thought I'd give you an opportunity just to give some final thoughts about everything we've talked about so far. And I know that you've seen some of the questions that have been coming in from people. And so just some general thoughts about where you are and really where you're going.

Yeah, I mean, look, Steve, the answer is very simple. The business has been reset. The cost structure is... Our margins are very high. The platform is built. The costs are sunk. The revenue is now showing sequential acceleration. From Q2 to Q3, sequential growth was 20%. From Q3 to Q4, sequential growth was over 100%. That's not incremental. That's exponential. That's why it matters. That's what matters. And so, you know, we're not promising anything. What we're saying is the financial results are starting to show the transformation. They constantly bash because I'm a positive-minded CEO and I speak in a positive tone. But the numbers are super, super positive. Putting aside me, if you just look at these numbers, These are very, very positive numbers for a public company. And if you start to project forward and you say, hey, well, if they went from 500,000 to a million from Q3 to Q4 using round numbers, and if they're able to go from a million to 2 million, and then if they're able to go from 2 million to 4 million, wow, the numbers get really big. really fast. And that's really what investors should be thinking about. I'm not promising 100% growth sequentially forever. But what I'm saying is that we've done it once. Yeah, the odds are we're going to do it again. And when you think about having enterprise sales guys that we've never had before, Evan Gappelberg, Reza Davariar, Madison Wynsma, Hareesh Achi Now the focus is on execution, scale, and turning Nextech, which is an AI-powered event platform, into a much, much larger company, Steve.

All right, Evan, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much. Great to catch up with you again, and we look forward to our next conversation, okay?

Thanks, Steve.

All right, there is Evan Gappelberg, the CEO of Nextech3D.ai, and I'm Steve Darling here in Vancouver. Thank you so much for joining us for another live stream event, and we'll see you down the road.