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spk02: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Venn Z Technologies Q4 2021 and 4-year results conference call. At this time, all lines are in the listen-only mode, but following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I would now like to turn the conference over to CEO of Venn Z Technologies, Mr. John Abrams. Please go ahead, sir.
spk00: Thank you, operator. Again, welcome to Venzi Technologies' fourth earnings call, covering today our Q4 2021 and full year results. My name is John Abrams. Since late 2019, I've led the company through a transition from rough concept to fully functional platform. Venzi is an AI supply chain platform now beginning to build revenue. In a moment, I will candidly address our challenges and our opportunities. Following my brief remarks, Our CFO, Darren Battersby, will provide the financial details of our progress. We will conclude our call today, as we always do, with some Q&A. Before we get started, I want to let you know the earnings release referenced on this call, the associated MD&A, as well as any slides we may speak to, can be found in the investor section of our website. Today's call may include forward-looking statements about Benzie's future performance. Actual performance could differ from what is suggested by our comments. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is contained in our CDAR filings. So let's get started with some candid comments. As you all know, we missed our revenue targets for 2021. We are all a bit, not just a bit, we're all very disappointed in our revenue results. And for sure, you investors are disappointed. Based on deep sales and operational commitment with opportunities in the back half of 2021, We were confident, and you heard that confidence from me and our team, and in public messaging. We were confident that several large contract-based deals would deliver our targeted revenue numbers by the end of 2021. For a number of reasons, those contracts didn't close when we expected. But, and this is important, we've not lost any of those deals, and our smaller non-contract clients continue to expand their use of our product. That expansion continues to be reflected in our revenue results, where we have continued to increase revenue quarter on quarter. I'm sure we'll have some fluctuation at points in the future, but the trend is up, and for the right reason. Our product outperforms competitors, and we are beginning to win against well-established alternatives. As we thought, once clients build us into their operational processes, we don't just stick, we expand. Throughout 2021, we have built the operations, tech, and sales foundation we need to grow revenue. We are fully geared up. We are executing. We are encouraged by the engagement and commitment our clients continue to demonstrate. We are hyper-focused on achieving more rapid revenue growth and getting back into our investors' good graces. Although we have not yet delivered on revenue at the level we expected, we are delivering. Since we began our 2019 pivot, we have seen a trend of increased revenue consecutively now for five quarters. We do not have measurable churn. We are indeed a sticky solution. Our job now is to accelerate our revenue growth to reach the levels we and you expect. That's our job. We have built the tech talent sales pipeline and client engagement to do our job and deliver the revenue results at the levels we all expect. We also want to be more clear about our revenue results. To do that, we're moving away from the release of KPIs that were confusing and hard to understand. We will anchor on the revenue as primary measures of our progress and going forward, Venzi will report on ARR, annual revenue, derived through contracts, teaming agreements, and direct-to-brand sales. Let me take a step back and review why our company is a disruptive technology in today's rapidly changing supply chain market. Venavi is a software as a service technology platform. We operate in a very active consumer retail sector of the global supply chain. We sell a product, what we call a mesh connector, that digitally connects brands, those that make product, to retailers who sell product. Our digital connection approach is important because most of the global supply chain today is manual and not connected. Manual process is the past. Manual solutions that dominate the supply chain today rely on people to input, understand, and manipulate product information for every product, every retailer, in every category, every time a product is set up for sale, modified, updated, or changed in any way. And if that were not complex enough, language, geography, and governmental regulations exponentially increase the manual challenge beyond human capabilities. All of this supply chain complexity is not just hard for people to manage. It is truly impossible. It is beyond what people can do. When they fail, we see errors, delays, and breaks in the chain. At scale, this challenge is crushing. Just look at the headlines. We see it reflected daily. Venzi disrupts this inadequate and outdated manual approach with modern artificial intelligence, AI that works and improves at scale in any language, in any product vertical without limit. We have the proof points. We know this. We also know our competitors continue to offer and service manual approaches based on outmoded warehouse EDI solutions data pools, or standards-based tools built on 1970s era tech. These legacy approaches to supply chain are failing both brands and retailers. We see the cracks in the competition, and our sales pipeline has and will continue to grow as a result. But if all of this is opportunity for Venzi, why aren't our revenues significantly higher today? Candidly, We are at the very beginning of our journey. It's not more complicated than that. We are competing with obviously outmoded manual solutions, but despite the clear flaws and challenges of those antiquated solutions, they are deeply embedded in thousands of brands and retailers across the globe. We can unseat those embedded solutions. It's hard, but change is hard. Change takes time, but change is happening. Recently, Two major and influential big box retailers abandoned their long-standing mandate to use one of our standards-based market competitors. We are now actively competing to win new brand deals as a result. We believe today we are at the beginning of a tipping point. What Canadian Malcolm Gladwell would say is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point at which the market moves our way. It tips. The obvious way brands and retailers in the supply chain will tip is away from manual processes and to digitally connected AI-driven solutions. They will move to Venzi. There is much to be encouraged about at this early stage of our journey. We have small but growing revenue. We have no churn. We have proven demonstrable tech advantage. We have streamlined our team and our expenditures in order to maximize focus on revenue growth. We are highly motivated, and we have a dedicated and talented team we have retained despite labor challenges over the past two years. We continue to attract top talent in highly competitive areas, including finance and artificial intelligence. We have built our brand recognition in the market. We are positioned to grow. We are positioned to win, and we will win massively in this lucrative market. For more details on our financial results, I'm going to turn the call over to Darren Battersby, our CFO in Vancouver. Darren.
spk01: Thank you, John. My name is Darren Battersby. I've served as Vinzi's CFO since John took over his leadership role in December 2019. I'm a member in good standing with the Institute of Chartered Professional Accountants. Today, I'll be discussing Vinzi's results for our year-end on December 31st, 2021. The numbers I reference will be in USC. denomination unless otherwise noted. Before I get into the financial details, there are a couple important items I'd like to point out that happened during the year. As John noted, the company successfully pivoted to a SaaS platform model, and now we've seen five consecutive quarters of increase on model SaaS revenue growth. In relation to this pivot, the company has moved from the negative margin sales to positive margin SaaS revenue sales this year. Also, during the year, we applied for and gained our US OTC ticket symbol, V-E-N-Z-F, allowing our U.S. investors to more easily access and trade our stock. Now onto the financial details. From a revenue perspective, the year ended with approximately $68,000 of revenue, up from $35,000 in 2020. For the three months ended, we had approximately $28,000 of revenue, up from $9,000 last year. As mentioned, we posted positive annual gross margin for the first time, of approximately $43,000. Our cost of sales now is primarily server and software costs to run the plant. Throughout the year, our overhead costs have increased, due primarily to additional people being hired during the year. This has also driven increases in the sales and marketing section, as well as the implementation and tech areas. Our G&A costs have also increased over the year, where we posted $2.9 million of G&A, and last year it was $1.6 million. As John noted previously, we've made strides and are looking to reduce our burn rates for fiscal 2022. Overall, we posted net losses of $3.6 million for fiscal 2021 as compared to $1.7 million loss for fiscal 2020. This gives us a $0.02 and $0.01 loss per share respectively. Lastly, I would like to highlight that we received approximately $2 million of funding throughout the year through the exercise of warrants, options, and COVID relief funds. Switching now to our capitalization table, we have 240 million common shares issued in outstanding, approximately 78 million outstanding warrants, 22 million stock options, and 1.9 million performance-based restricted share units. Fully diluted, there are 343 million shares outstanding, giving us a market cap of approximately $11 million Canadian. Thank you for your time. We look forward to interacting and talking with you, our shareholders. We encourage you to reach out to our investor relations team. This marks the end of my discussion of our formal results, and I'll hand it back to John.
spk00: Thank you, Darren. We will now open up the call to investor questions. Operator, if you could now open the lines for questions from the audience.
spk02: Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please submit them via the webinar platform. Thank you.
spk00: Hey, and this is John back. And I just switched over to the Q&A screen. And right now we're at nearly 20 questions. So thanks for all of the questions. comments. I'll just start with the first one that came in. And I don't know that I'll get to all of them. As many of you know, I spend a lot of time with our investor community. So if I don't get to your specific questions, some of these are very lengthy questions. So if I don't get to yours, I will... I will make myself available. Feel free to reach out to me directly or to our investor relations team through our website, and we will set up time and we can dig into some of the more detailed questions. But let me start with the first one that came in, and very appropriate. It says, in December, Venzi announced it hit its target for revenue and connectors. What happened? We had... A couple of contract deals that we expected to close. And as I said in my formal comments just a few minutes ago, we expected those to close. And there were a number of things that happened. One of the companies across its leadership team was affected by COVID. So we had verbal commitment and had a rollout plan that got waylaid. And so fundamentally, We were very confident and I think maybe overly so in terms of our enthusiasm. But you heard that from me. In fact, any of the public calls that I did, you heard my confidence because we know the rollout plans for these deals and they are quite exciting. So yes, I am very confident those deals will mature and you'll hear more about them in the coming weeks. So I am still excited about them and I am excited about the other opportunities in our pipeline. There is a question in here about the value of our pipeline. I don't think we've ever disclosed the value of our pipeline. I can say it is significant and there is another question that I just, it's off my screen right now, but related to KPIs and releasing revenue metrics based on that. So let me say this. Our pipeline is healthy. I don't think it would be right to disclose that pipeline because I think it would be, again, setting expectations that may or may not materialize. I can say that it's in the multi-millions of dollars today at the later stage of the pipeline as those of you that have been involved with sales teams for a long time, that pipeline or that funnel, it's very large at the top. And when you get down to contract decisions, it's much smaller. So the ones that are at the latest stage, at the contract signature stage, it's very healthy. There's robust dollars associated with that. I think that's all I wish to say on that. And then there's yet another question related to revenues. What are our projections over the next couple of years? We have not released projections for several years. I will say that with some additional financial folks that we are working with in the U.S., we do have projections internally for this year, next year, and the year after. So we do have our internal numbers. I think what would be best to do is when we finalize what we want to make public about that and begin to issue more of our contract-based wins, we will associate that with, I don't want to say guidance because that's very specific and I don't think we're ready to do that, but we will start sharing more about what those contracts look like at the later stage of the pipeline. maybe a dissatisfying answer today, but I'm very pleased with what's in the pipeline. I'm very pleased with the progress of that pipeline. The cracks that I mentioned in some of our competitors are significant. These are competitors that have had solutions in the market for decades that people are now walking away from. And those opportunities were very much involved in picking up those those brands that are walking away from the established old guard legacy solutions and getting after them. So I'm very happy with where the pipeline is, and I'm very happy with our internal numbers. Of course, you want to see them, and I understand that. I think it would be incorrect of me to put that out there today, so I'm not going to do that, but certainly we can talk offline if you wish. Can we say more about why we will no longer disclose KPIs? The KPIs, they're nice numbers, but we were putting them out in lieu of revenue, really. And so we were putting a lot of information out that led to confusion. And we spent a lot of time explaining KPIs that At the end of the day, you as investors really want to translate to revenue. That's what the KPIs are about. And we weren't allowing you to do that. So we were giving you numbers that you couldn't actually make that mathematical connection. And it was frustrating. So it led to confusion and it led to dissatisfaction. What I'd rather do and what with our financial advisors, what we think is the right thing to do is say, Here's exactly where the revenue is. It's growing. It's trending the right way. It's not huge, but it's sticky. It's performing. Companies that we engage with expand the number of channels they use. And so let's anchor on the revenue as it is. You can be bothered that it's not got enough zeros behind it, but it's trending the right way. And with our contract-based focus now, you'll see those numbers on the revenue side increase at a much healthier clip. So that's why we're walking away from KPIs. We still track them. So things like churn, we don't have any churn. Things like the number of active retail connections. So how many retailers are we plugged into? Those are important things and we know those answers, but putting those out instead of revenue is not the right thing to do. And we have to get more clear and less confusing about the numbers we put out to all of our investor community. What's our cash position and are we concerned? Our cash position, many of you know, we have a round open. We've taken some money in on that round and we have some very good interest. The round isn't closed yet, but we're comfortable that We have the right folks involved to close that round. So we're pleased with the interest in it. We do because we're not exercising warrants right now. We do need to take in some cash. Am I concerned? We're an early stage company and we're not a break even. So of course, I'm always focused on do we have the support? Do we have an investment to keep operations going? So yes, that is always my focus. I think we're a great opportunity as an early stage company in a big market. Think about this. Try this at your next dinner party. Say that you're working with an AI supply chain company. Everybody in the table pays attention. So we are an early stage investment in a very healthy market. Some of my friends at Accenture and some of the system integrators They are now all starting to pivot into the space from a solution providing perspective. They're largely selling consulting, but it's an indicator that the Fortune 500 is now shifted to investing in supply chain in a much more healthy way. So we're at the early stage, of course, but we like where that is going in terms of investment and the benefit to us. This is sort of a duplicate. Will we be sharing new targets, revenue, et cetera, as we've done in the past? I think I answered that a bit. We have those internal numbers. We have to come to an agreement internally what kind of, again, I don't know that this is the right term, what kind of guidance we want to put out there. We're very pleased with what our target is for this year. And we've alluded to that in the past. So we're in that same space in terms of aimed at the annual or the ARR, annual recurring revenue for this year. And we're on that path. So that's all I'll say right now. But expect more in that vein. And that will be based on contract-based deals. And here's a question on contracts. What's the difference between contract and non-contract sales? We hired several sales folks midpoint of 2021, and those folks hunt for bigger games. So a lot of the deals that we took in were individual brands coming in looking for a connector to an individual retailer. So somebody comes in and says they want to go to Walmart, and we sell that connection. The contract deals are much larger, so they are for many different brands and or many different retail targets. So that's what those salespeople are focused on, and that's been our focus since midpoint of last year. So that's the difference between the individual, non-contract, traditionally SaaS-based sales and contract-based sales. Another question on the pipeline, I've addressed that a couple of times. What was the cause of the significant increase in your expenditures? I don't know that there was any one particular time at which point we spiked our expenditures, but there were two things that were happening simultaneously. sort of the back half of last year. One was we were ramping up for some of the contract deals that I talked about earlier. So there was some cost there in terms of our operational folks. I think the bigger cost really comes from the technical side of our team. We have AI programmers. So I don't know if you know much about what goes on in the world of tech these days, but As the world started to ramp back up post-pandemic shutdown, technology folks became in high demand, and their cost spiked. So the amount of money that the average programmer could make really increased. AI programmers are at the top of the heap right now. So you can't get better than having AI programming skills. And we have those people. So our platform is AI at the core. We did not only invest in those programmers, but we built out a function that a lot of our contract-based deals were looking for. And that function allows them to shorten the proof-of-concept stage. So if you're making a big investment in Venzi, you want to know it's going to work. And so you do a proof-of-concept test. we were having some difficulty at simplifying that. So we were forcing a much heavier technical investment that several companies have bought into and made that investment, but we wanted to lower the barrier. So we expended a good deal of technical work to build out a function that shortens that cycle. The other benefit of that is we now have a fully functional demo that we can show end to end. So we can show content coming in, we can show our AI and we can show that content appearing at a retailer. So we do something in a matter of minutes that our competitors might take six months to do. So it's a really cool function. Any of you that want to see a demo, you know, uh, I wouldn't want to do them all month long, but if you want to see it, it's a, it's a really cool show. And, uh, We may actually even record that so that some folks can see that as they wish. An interesting question. We'll take this another few minutes to the top of the hour, so more questions than what I'll be able to get to, but this one's interesting. Has illness affected Venzi or any of its deals? So the first part of that, Venzi... Most all of our team has had COVID at one point or another over the past couple of years. Some have had it a couple of times. Here's the nice thing. Venzi went to a distributed workforce well ahead of the pandemic. So we were already global. And so the nice thing is when somebody on the team gets COVID, you don't lose a whole group within Venzi because we're distributed. So as waves of COVID would go regional, we would see one person or two people fall out for a few days or a week with COVID. But we didn't lose an entire group or the full team. So we weren't very affected. That's not to minimize the pain that people went through. in fighting COVID, but we were not significantly affected as an organization. We did have some of our partners, some of our deals that got delayed because of COVID. And so as companies were working as a group, you'd wipe out an entire group like the tech team or the leadership team. And those delays were were often significant. And in a couple of cases, we're still working through them with companies where people have retired as a result of COVID or the challenges that that wrought for them or their family. So yeah, we do see that in our clients, and it has affected us. Is 13,000 connections still your end of year target? So maybe I'll make this the last question because there's many more and I don't want to take it too far or I want to end it at the top of the hour is the point. Yeah, in fact, our deals are above that. So the contract deals that we have in hand are significantly above that 13,000 target. We're very happy with the numbers that are in the deals that we are working with and the clients that we have on board. So, yeah, we're very happy with the numbers. There are bigger brands that are coming our way. And we have some engagement from retailers who are moving away from legacy solutions and looking for the type of intelligence and automation that Benzi provides. So I'll wrap it up. We are in a good position. One way you can look at this call today is John sounds very upbeat, and I am upbeat because while we are at the early stage, I believe we are at the tipping point. And I am a big Gladwell fan. We are at the tipping point. It is a big deal. We are very excited about the engagement and the traction we have in the market, and I hope you are too, and you share my enthusiasm. If I didn't get to your question, please reach out, and we will set up additional time. And thank you so much for engaging, and have a great Tuesday. Thank you very much.
spk02: Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending. And at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines.
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