Venzee Technologies Inc.

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.

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.

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.