This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk00: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Vansi Technologies Q1 2022 Results Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. 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. Questions can be submitted at any time through the online webcast player. I would now like to turn the conference over to CEO of Venzi Technologies, Mr. John Abrams. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, operator. Again, welcome to Venzi Technologies' sixth earnings call. Today we will be covering our Q1 2022 results. My name is John Abrams, and since late 2019, I've led the company through a transition from a rough concept to a fully functional platform with active and expanding revenue-generating clients. Venzi is an AI supply chain platform, now beginning to build revenue and, importantly, attracting significant growth opportunities. In a moment, I'll address developments since our last call, and 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 in this call, the associated MD&A. as well as any slides we may speak to, can be found in the Investors 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. For those of you that attended our earnings call May 3rd, many of my remarks will be familiar. As such, we will have a fairly quick call today, hitting mainly on large contract status and other positive developments. As we discussed on our last call, we will key on revenue as a measure of progress. As you can see, subtracting some one-time integration fees reflected in Q4, revenue remains insignificant. We realize and feel the pressure to move beyond this stage into material revenue growth. But let me tell you why our team remains excited about our revenue potential, given where we are today. First, while several of our 2021 partner engagements ended abruptly due to acquisition by competitors, two engagements have moved forward and have completed integration with our platform recently. Following integration, we've seen two brands validate retail connections and subsequently request additional connections. While the revenue result is trivial at this early stage, It is increasing. Second, two significant contract revenue opportunities, opportunities that we have discussed previously, continue to move forward, albeit more slowly than we would like, but with clear progress and through some rigorous testing, real validation of our solution. Two other recent items we view as positive, and one as even potentially significant. The first, in late 2021, we redesigned our website to allow direct purchase of our retail mesh connector product. We did this to stick a marketing finger in the eye of our competitors, who only provide a limited number of retail connections, even after a lengthy build process. We are different. With Venzi, and we say on our site, you can pick any of several hundred retail connections and activate them immediately with just a credit card. We expected this marketing message would generate sales leads, and it has. But recently, it has generated sales. Small indeed, but this is a radically different approach in our market, and we now can show revenue as a positive proof point. We expect site-based revenue generation will increase over the year at some level. Second, and a potentially significant item, A partner who has previously validated our technology has expressed a desire to secure a more advantaged position for the use of our technology for their client base. We are excited to have additional validation of our platform and will work with the partner to produce a mutually beneficial result and add to our revenue in line with our full year goals. We main resolute in our mission to grow sales and create shareholder value. Because today's broken manual supply chain will be replaced with digital tools such as ours, we know we will be successful in growing our sales and creating significant shareholder value. I conclude my remarks today with this summary. We have significant contracts on our plate. We are well engaged with large customers. We have early evidence of durable recurring revenue, and we have some revenue opportunities emerging that we didn't expect. Like many advanced technology plays, we feel the pinch of the capital markets right now and are responding. We made the difficult but prudent decision to reduce operational expenditures that extend our runway in line with our maturing pipeline opportunities and the deals we have in active contract negotiation. We have an open funding round and we expect to close this round successfully because we have committed investors who believe in the merit of our approach and see the evidence of growth that we see. Already, we have taken in some capital in this round, and when the markets tank, we made adjustments to the terms of the round to ensure its success. As I said on our last call, indeed, there is much to be encouraged about at this early stage of Venzi's growth journey. We have an outstanding team. We have small but growing revenue. We have no churn. We have proven demonstrable tech advantage. that market participants continue to validate. We have begun to grow. We have begun to win clients in a supply chain market that is every day moving to embrace the advanced technology Benzi uniquely offers. Now, for details on our financial results for the quarter, I'm going to turn the call over to our CFO, Darren Battersby in Vancouver. Darren.
spk02: Thank you, John. I'm CFO of Benzi. Technologies and a member of the Institute of Chartered Professional Accountants and Good Stand. Today, I'll be discussing the results for our quarter ended March 31st, 2022. The numbers I reference will be in U.S. denomination unless otherwise noted. From a revenue perspective, the quarter ended with $10,000 of revenue, up slightly from our $9,000 in Q1 2021. We continue to post positive annual gross margins. Our G&A costs for the quarter were approximately $1 million, Q1 fiscal 2021, we were about $900,000. We've made strides to reduce our burn for fiscal 2022. These will be reflected more in the second quarter. Overall, we posted net losses of $993,000 for Q1 fiscal 2022, giving us a zero per share loss per share, compared to $649,000 for Q1 fiscal 2021, which also gave us a zero dollars per share loss. In regards to our current capitalization table, we have 2,243 million common shares issued and outstanding, approximately 76 million warrants outstanding, 22 million stock options, and 1.9 million performance-based restricted share units. Fully diluted, we are approximately 343 million shares outstanding with a market cap of approximately 8.5 million Canadian right now. After the quarter we closed our non-broker private placement we previously announced March 30th, we did approximately 400,000 Canadian issuing about 5 million shares at $0.08 per share. Price at this level, we found some restrictions in the current market conditions, so we had to adjust our private placement to the exchange minimum of $0.05 per unit. So we're still looking to raise a million dollars. We are currently going to close our first Toronto very shortly. Thank you for your time. Look forward to interacting and talking with you, the shareholders. This ends the remarks from my discussion. I'll hand it back to John.
spk01: Thank you, Darren. We'll now move to investor questions. So operator, if you could remind participants how to submit questions.
spk00: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please submit them through the online webcast player. Please proceed.
spk01: So there are... It's always surprising to me. You guys must be way up on caffeine more than I am. More questions than we'll get through. But let's start and... Will not take a lot of your time this morning. Some of these are bunched around partners. So let me digest. So I'll start with this one. You continue to say there's a large engagement on the horizon. Why are they not complete or driving revenue? So, yes, there are large engagements. Some of them we've moved into contract negotiation that we've been talking about for several months. There were a number of factors that affected each of those contracts, different factors, even COVID affected one of the management teams with one of the partners. there's also technical validation. And the reason that the technical validation takes a while, and I think this was a little bit challenging to us, we believe that if you connect to our API, which is the technical interface to our platform, and you test a channel, say you're moving product information from your client through our platform across the API into our Amazon. We think that once you complete that test for one channel or one client, it should be the same. And in fact, technically it is, but these are folks that have in some cases, you know, six, 7,000 clients. And their concern is if we switch them to your platform and it doesn't work for one of them, uh, how, how is that going to look? How can we effectively or, uh, uh, with a lot of confidence, roll that out. And so there's some hesitation more than what we expected on the technical side. So our platform works and it is getting validated, but the fear that golly, this is new technology, it has a bunch of AI, we didn't build it, there is some hesitation and that's taken longer to prove out or get through separate and distinct from some of the other things that have affected these clients. So the contract stage has taken longer, and it's taken longer for primarily two reasons. One, things we couldn't anticipate occurring at the contract or at the partner's environment or within their operation. And two, just some fear and uncertainty about switching a large group of their clients into technology that they haven't tested every single channel now they're never going to test every single channel we think that we've gotten to a place where we have proven what we need to prove and those contracts are indeed moving forward so there are large engagements in the contract stage and they they are moving forward and they are although it's small driving a revenue uptick the other thing that you should know and i mentioned this in my comments is that during the testing phase and we booked and already recognized this revenue, we charged those contract partners for that testing. So we did indicate in previous results that we took in those dollars. We will, going forward, if we generate more dollars out of our web interface, if we start taking in a lot of money that is one-time testing money, We'll start to break that out and Darren will report on that as separate items. Why aren't you comfortable or why are you comfortable completing a raise given market conditions? What do you see that we don't? I think what I see in our investor base is two things. There are some investors that have been with Venzi since its founding. I wasn't with Venzi at its founding. I came along much later, attracted to its technology primarily. We had sold a company to a Chicago-based company, and I was looking for unique tech in the space. So I haven't been here this entire time. And so I see our investors in two groups, some folks that invested very early on, for i think different reasons in terms of uh how we were growing the company the the folks that are investing because of the uh plan that i laid out feel a little bit different to me they're they understand the opportunity they understand what we needed to do to pivot to capture the opportunity and they continue to uh invest in us so that's why i'm comfortable it's not It's not thousands of folks, but it's a handful of folks that do see and align with our vision. They are, like I am, impatient about growing the revenue, but they are committed and they continue to signal that, and that's why I'm comfortable. So, I don't think I have more to say on that. You always say that your tech is part of the solution for supply chain problems, but if that's true, why are sales not growing faster? So supply chain, and I won't get into a lecture mode on this, but supply chain has really been around for 5,000 years. And of course, technology doesn't go back that far, but many of the processes that are in place today in the supply chain. I've been in supply chain for better than 20 years. Many of the processes that are in place are manual. When computers came along, they started using spreadsheets and fax machines and things like that. There were also solutions for inventory management called EDI and there's some other, you know, I won't get into the acronyms, there's some other technologies in there as well that started to use computers. These technologies were built around really 1970s era technology. And so you had very limited capabilities within the databases. We have a very different approach. The folks that built the original tech at Benzi had a different approach. Rather than store all your data, it was transactional. It would come in and get exchanged. We'd match one thing on one side to one thing on the other side. So it's a radically different approach. The reason that I think that things are slow is that switching people off of, even if it is inadequate technology, switching them from the processes they've built up over literally decades is difficult and we understand that. At the same time, people are moving and they are coming to us even folks that are peers in the industry saying, hey, you guys have built something unique and interesting, which is why we can still attract and do attract partners and people who want to engage us because our tech is different and unique. So the sales will catch up to that need to modernize the tech. It just takes longer than what I would like it to and certainly longer than what you would like it to. But it is happening. It is changing. The tech is functional and is radically different than what's in the market today. A lot of questions. It does not sound like you want to sell your product through the website, but if that's a path, why not do that? It is a path. What we're offering on our website really is a connection to our APIs. which requires a little bit of technical knowledge. So you have to have a technical person or team at your site, your company, in order to connect to that API. So our position was, hey, we want to do this to point out to our competitors, people like One World Sync, some of the EDI players, and point out that we are radically different. You can actually click and buy. You also have to have some knowledge in order to click and connect to an API. Uh, and, and what surprises me about people now doing that is the market is maturing. People are getting more sophisticated. People can connect to, uh, our, our technology and they're choosing to do that and put their credit card up, which is our, our model. It's a SAS model. Uh, so it, It's surprising to me that a marketing campaign is now generating direct revenue as opposed to generating leads. We're not opposed to it. It's a great idea, but we really think the big win for us is maturing our relationships with our partners, getting the contracts closed that we need to get closed and hitting our revenue targets this year. If the web starts generating real traction, real sales, and I'm sure it will over time, but I'm not really counting on that to be a significant change for this year. Uh, so, uh, not opposed to selling through the web, but it was really a marketing approach to, uh, as I said in my comments, put a finger in the eye of our competitors, uh, which, which we're doing. There's several questions around this. Who is our new partner? I can't say, uh, uh, they know us, um, uh, and, uh, we're encouraged, um, We track new activity like this, of course, and we get excited when people who know what we're doing and have vetted us want to do something more. Is it direct sales that manifest that result? I don't think so. I think it's simply this. A lot of partners believe that they can find what we do in other parts of the technology landscape. And the fact is, you can't. We are truly unique. And so partners who may have come to us a couple of years ago and said, hey, you know, interesting, but we don't want to bet on a young startup company. They go look around and they see what's in the technical landscape and they come back to us because we do have a unique approach. And we're genuinely excited about that. There is some aggressiveness in the folks we're talking to, so we'll see where that leads, and we'll give you more details on that as that matures. Next question. You used to issue KPI numbers on a monthly basis. When are you going to put those out again? So I said this in our last poll. both in my formal remarks and in Q&A, and actually several people have called since our May 3rd call to have direct conversations with me about the KPIs. The KPIs were really confusing folks, and so I spent more time talking about relating KPIs to revenue, and it wasn't a very satisfying discussion. They tended to be frustrated and and I was I was doing it to promote something that I think is important we have a path to real revenue and so I was using the KPI numbers to show what that path looks like the problem is that we couldn't get clear timing so I could tell you where we had engagement through the KPIs and but I couldn't convert that to revenue on the time scale that I expected or was at all predictable. And so it created confusion and there were too many KPIs. And so we decided, let's just back away from those. Let's be really clear and transparent about where our revenues are. They are not where we want them to be. And we talked about that in our last quarterly call. And we talked about it again today. They are really in a word, insignificant revenue. But if you dig down and look at those revenue increases, they are consistent and they are based on large clients, some of which are coming through these contracts that we're still working to fully close. So, you know, they're in testing mode, but, you know, There's a momentum with them, so we believe we'll get them to contract signature, and they're big deals. So there is some revenue. It is ticking up. It's small, but I can tell you, being at the early days of the Internet, we had a lot of these same discussions about some of what turned out to be very large entities in the web space that at the beginning no to negative revenue for a long time and then they would just slowly grow and it grew as it should and I believe the same in this case. It is small revenue. Feel free to be critical of that. I'm critical of it too but it is growing and it is consistently growing and we don't lose customers so that's a big deal to us. Comment on I think this is related because it's in this KPI comment. Comment on the number of mesh connectors. So I don't want to get too far into trying to rehash the KPIs. We're focused on revenue as our key performance indicator, one number. But I am very pleased that, and we use this in sales, is that we have a number of retail connections that we represent through our website and through our platform. That number technically right now is 531, and there's another 222 retail connections that we are adding. I don't know if they're on the platform today, but they're coming soon. So that will put us over 750 connections. The reason that is important, I don't share that on a regular basis anymore as part of our KPIs, but the reason that's important on the marketing and sales side is that most of our competitors offer, say, the top 25 connections. They tend to be to things like Amazon and Walmart, Kroger. There's a number of large North American companies retail outlets that most of our competition has built connections with. The interesting thing about us, and this is what draws people to us, is that we're not in the top. We don't aim at the top 10 or the top 50 or the top 100. We have over 750 that are active on our platform. So that retail inventory, as we often call it, is what attracts buyers into our space, and we have an advantage on the numbers. We're going to wrap up at the bottom of the hour. Our call is set for 30 minutes today. Feel free. I'll take one more question here out of the mix. and let's make it about cost reductions since that that's an interesting one to me again as I always say reach out to me directly you can find me through our website I'm always happy to spend time and get into more detail I won't even if you ask politely I won't tell you who our new partner is and I won't tell you a whole lot more detail than what I've shared on this call about any of those partner relationships. But feel free, if you didn't get your question answered, to reach out. And whether it's something in my specific area or if it's in Darren's, we'll get you the answer. And always happy to talk directly with folks. I would say this. Even when we announced our numbers that we weren't pleased with for Q4, a number of folks called and said, look, I'm not going to kick you over this, you know, but you sound really enthused and excited. Why is that? And I think all of the folks that have those conversations understand that we have something special here. They believe as we do in our growth future and they get excited about it. So I'm always happy to share that enthusiasm. It's not just me, it's our team and it's the folks that are coming to us to work with us. So Said I'd take one more question before we wrap up at the bottom of the hour. Will your operational cost reductions put, I think, in-flight deals at risk? No. No. I think if we cut too deep, there's always a risk because some of these in-flight deals, they are vetting us with their technical teams, and there are relationships that form as a result of that. So part of the trust... in putting their clients on our platform comes from trusting that the technical people that they work with, the operational folks they work with, know their stuff, they build a relationship, they trust them. Trust is at the core of getting deals done. So I am very sensitive about if we dropped people on our team and they all have a great deal of expertise in this field, If we drop too many of those folks and we start to erode that trust Yes, we would put in-flight deals at risk at this point. I am comfortable that we haven't done that We we know our team very well. We've cut areas that are not germane to those relationships we've we've cut some of our marketing and ancillary staff. We're a young, small team, as you guys know, so everybody has to roll up their sleeves every day. Staff that does marketing, we've mothballed a number of programs that we used on the marketing side. I think that has some long-term risk if we don't hit our numbers and continue to invest in the company and the team. For now, no, I don't feel we're putting our our deals at risk and we have plenty of capacity within the system. The other thing, just to be candid, the most expensive folks on our team are technical folks. Most of them are contractors within Venzi. Well, I'll just leave it at that. And we have reduced or put some of the enhancements to our platform on hold in order to save those high dollar contract costs. So we think we're doing the right thing. All of our deals continue to move along. Again, we want them to move faster, but they're moving along, and reductions aren't hurting that. I said I'd cut this at the bottom of the hour, and so, operator, if you would wrap up the call, and if anybody has a question that didn't get answered, and I know I didn't get to all of them, please reach out and happy to schedule time and get to your questions. Thank you so much and have a great day.
spk00: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Goodbye.
Disclaimer