Blackbird plc (BIRD.L) 2026-09-27 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blackbird plc Interim Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand over to the team from Blackbird plc. Ian, good morning, sir.

Good morning, Jake, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Blackbird's Interim Results 2026. Before I kick off, I would just like to introduce my fellow team members. We have Ness, who I think you all met at the AGM. Ness is from Scale Up and is our fractional Chief Marketing Officer; Stephen Streater, company founder and inventor of Blackbird. And here, we have Sumit Rai, who is our Chief Product Officer; and as of today, our new Board member. Congrats Sumit. Right, let's kick off. So before I start, I'd just like to address a few things. Firstly, last time, we had some sound issues. And I want to make sure that we don't have that again. We've actually got a volunteer developer/sound engineer here in the office with us to make sure that, that doesn't happen. And we are monitoring this as we go through the presentation. So if you are experiencing any sound problems, please let us know. The second elephant I will address is the cash situation. So I know that a lot of you are concerned about that. Of course, we are monitoring the situation very carefully ourselves. But let me just remind you of our strategy around our revenue. We're building a revenue engine. And with that, we want to make sure that our revenue engine is starting to make economic sense. That is that we are putting -- that every user that we acquire, every subscriber we acquire has a lifetime value that starts to be equal or greater, much greater than that acquisition cost. And our focus really still is on marketing teams, and Vanessa will talk you through why marketing teams are incredibly valuable to us. But also product-led growth and virality often is kickstarted by the masses, and therefore, we will continue to fill the funnel with those early creators and students, et cetera, at the top of the funnel. So that's really important to note. So as we go to the first slide here, I think that we put some numbers out in August that are now have been improved further on as we get to the end of September. And this really tells you the story of how our conversion metric is improving. So our subscription growth in Q3 is around -- it's going to be estimated around 235%. And the key numbers here are the fact that this has improved from back in March, where we were converting at around 1% for every new user coming in -- or every 100 users coming in to 2.4% at the end of June. And now as we go to the end of September at around 3.4%. Together with that, we've also reduced churn down to 11%. Of course, things are always moving around, but that's a really good number to look at. And that's actually led to our ARR improving from June at around GBP 30,000 to end of September at around GBP 90,000. Again, these are really small numbers. We're very well aware of that, but it can be -- you can see that we're starting to get that exponential growth and that revenue engine is starting to take shape. We're also seeing that in the -- the sector that we're really focused on as in the marketing teams that although virality and product-led growth is yet to be proven, we're seeing growth in the rate that people do share and therefore, the superior ARPU and retention in the group that we're focusing on. So I'll come back at the end of this presentation, but I'm going to pass over to Sumit now to talk you through our product improvements.

Okay. So everyone knows that this year has been a huge year for product development. We know that at the end of last year, whilst we were available, obviously, as a product to the market, we still have a lot of important things to add. And a huge factor as to why our conversion ratios have moved this year, and you can see that massive growth from the 1 to 3.4 is a lot to do with obviously product that is available, so people who come into the product, there's all of a sudden more reason for them to actually convert, pay for the product because there are features which are often behind the paywall, but also features that are just generally available within the product. Some massive things that we've added already this year, obviously, the Epidemic Sound work that we did in bringing a really best-in-class sound library to the market. We also improved our font support, so not only adding thousands of fonts, but also providing custom fonts available to users. We improved the AI side of the product with things like voice isolation, which is a really crucial tool for people producing any kind of content. We also introduced Colour grading, and this has become a really popular feature for the product, which was already on top of the existing LUTs and LUKs that we already had. We also began the beginning of our quick -- of our animation work. And this is a really important thing, which we'll come on to a little bit later because we have done a lot of work behind the scenes on the engine, and we'll discuss this. We also added some really important features, which you don't see very well or very often or done well even in NLEs, which is things like the project recovery. We think it's a best-of-class system. You're being able to go back and look at where our product was, especially in a multiplayer environment because one of the fears that people have about multiplayer is what happens if another user comes in and alters something which has already been done. Well, we have a great history in the products that you can roll back to any point. We also changed and tweaked the plans. We obviously learn as we're going along, and we're able to analyze what people are buying to what levels. And we've made little tweaks along the way, obviously, with pricing, but also with what people can do. But we're in a good position. We are definitely at a point, as we said in the summer, where this is a very, very usable product. And so that's why we're now experiencing our growth. But obviously, it's only still the beginning of the longest story. And the things which are coming next are going to be really exciting. A major thing that we've done this year and a lot of the work done through Stephen's team also with the day-to-day Elevate development team, is to really improve the way the engine is capable of handling more than just video. We're known for our ability to handle video, but we have added the ability to do graphics and text now at a much, much higher level. You saw a snippet of that earlier this year in the AGM, where we demoed some of our effects work, which is all going through our pipeline at the moment. By being GPU accelerated, we're able to bring desktop capability to our online experience. And that's a major, major advancement. We've always led the way with video, but now we're going to be able to actually also jump ahead and be on par with things like some of the bigger products in terms of how we can handle text and graphics. So I'm going to give you a little demo in a minute of some of that, but -- that's only just part of it. We're also doing a whole bunch of work on integration, so things like YouTube upgrade, some good quality of life features like view-only users because we want organizations who use our product to be able to share amongst their own company and have people who can come in and see the product. It's how we use other products. Not everyone is a creator, but a lot of people are stakeholders. So we want to introduce and make this a real team product. The other thing that we're doing is expanding the ability to get content into the system. At the moment, you can upload by file from a phone or from the desktop, but we do live in a wider ecosystem, and we're expanding that the same way that we're expanding how you can output to things like YouTube, but also how you can get content into the system. The eventual goal for that goes down to cameras directly. But in the interim, there are other things that we will be able to support, other platforms will be able to support to send video content directly to us. And then a really important feature, something which has been a growing market, something that I've spent a lot of time in the past working on things like webcam capture. So being able to allow people to create content directly from the desktop as well, things like that are coming and audio effects, which we know that we have a need there that we haven't fulfilled yet. So coming on to some of that exciting stuff that we've done, I want to give a demo of the up-and-coming bit of product that we have within our system, which is the GPU accelerated graphics engine. So this is something that you'll be seeing come to the platform soon. It's work that we're doing where we're actually going to not just take tech, which we've had historically, and it's been capable, but it has been a simplified version. But we're actually bringing a very, let's just say, desktop level capability to that. So it doesn't just mean being able to do text in the way that you would expect to use text within sort of a desktop publishing product or something like that. But it also -- and this is the exciting bit, also means that we're able to take text and be able to create a whole bunch of presets that people could use to get started with their content. So for example, I take that, trump it in, you'll see that it's a really nicely animated piece of text. But also, it means that you can go in there and you can change any of the things. So let's just call this nice this one can change there to easy like that. So things can be changed very easily, but also the controls and the very, very fine control that we have for every bit of how that animation works, its positioning, the color schemes that go with it. All of these can be easily adapted. And where they're best used is things like lower thirds. So we're allowing users to directly drop on a little lower third. Maybe there's another one we can add here, move that along. We could reposition that. Users will be able to go in, change things very simply, change things like backdrop colors and then save them out as presets so they can use them within all of their own productions very, very easily. Now the thing that you'll notice is that the whole experience is incredibly smooth. Everything that we're doing here has a very, very, very desktop-like feel. And all of that's been made possible. We've done it with video, but we're now doing it with graphics and text. And we believe that this is going to put us really not just on par with what happens with some of the bigger NLEs and desktop products. But actually, text is traditionally done quite badly, and it means that a lot of the time, people have to rely on visual effects tools like After Effects to do the sort of more complex animations. We're bringing that experience directly into the browser and obviously more available to people because our product is easier to use, more available product to the market. So that's our roundup of product.

Over to marketing.

Thank you. Good morning, everybody. So just to give you a bit of a snapshot overview. So the top left graph on the left is just looking at the subscriber growth over the last 3 months. So July kind of marks the period where we started to invest in acquisition again after a period of kind of research and understanding exactly how we wanted to position Elevate in the market. So mid-July was when we started to invest and that also timed with some changes that were made to pricing and how we moved users from free plan into the paid plan. So that shift in growth over those months kind of reflects that period. August is significantly higher, most likely as a result of the combination of those things, us changing the pricing as well as continuing to invest in marketing channels through that period. And then September is still coming up as we close out the month. But importantly, alongside that investment, when we look at the return on those efforts, when we compare our current levels of spend to earlier in the year of February when we were previously investing from a marketing perspective, we've reduced CAC by almost 2/3 in that time through that work that's been done around really understanding the audience, aligning our proposition and messaging to align with that positioning in the market. And we continue to do regular qualitative research cycles to continue sharpening that messaging, that positioning and understanding the types of users that we're acquiring, what they're looking for and Elevate how we provide value and how we can kind of double down on that through our efforts ongoing. And whilst PPC at the moment remains our primary acquisition channel, we have, through this period, also been testing other paid channels, which we'll be continuing to look at Q4. But also on top of that, looking at how we actually really invest in our brand from an organic perspective. So moving into Q4, we're going to be focusing quite heavily on reestablishing YouTube as a demand gen channel, so owning a much more deliberate content strategy over there. That YouTube is becoming an increasingly important channel for AI and LLM discovery as well. We've improved the AI discovery over the last 3 months by quite some way, but it continues to be a really important aspect for us to focus on, and we'll be continuing to do so through the likes of digital PR, YouTube, as I've said, and looking for opportunities for us to develop kind of real citations of those platforms and then use to make recommendations. And another big focus through all of the work that we're doing, as Ian has already alluded to, is making sure that we're continuously -- ways that we can improve that conversion from free users to paid plans. So some of the work that we're doing at the moment and moving into Q4 is really focused on remarketing. So making sure that once we bring new users into the platform on those free plans and they sign up and saw that we continue to invest in them as users and encourage them to experience the value of Elevate so much they go on to a paid plan. And through all of the interviews and research that we're doing, we hear some really interesting stories of the types of users coming into use Elevate. And whilst quite a lot of our user base is still solo editors, projects, a mix of hobbyists and creators and teams, we see a lot of those people talking about the fact that the collaborative potential of Elevate is a big draw for all of those different types of users, the fact that they can bring other people into their projects, work with them, whether that be friends, colleagues, what have you. So we continue to look at those different mechanics of how we can get more people working together in the product over time as well.

Great. Thank you, Ness. So we've kept this one very short, so we've got lots of time for questions. But just really to summarize that we have really seen the momentum accelerate following the marketing freeze that we imposed from March to kind of halfway through July. And now with the features and UI experience, it's really in sync with the marketing that's come in, we would expect to see similar growth going forward. So it's very nice. We're seeing the machine really finally tuned now, and we'll continue to fine-tune that further. So ladies and gentlemen, let me invite questions.

Perfect. If I may just jump back in there and Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. [Operator Instructions] Just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can all be accessed via your dashboards. We have received a number of questions. So if I may now hand over to you to just read out those questions and give your responses where appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great.

Thank you very much, Jake. I think most of the questions are quite short this time, which is a blessing for me, but I will try and get through the main ones now. So the first one is what happened with Soundbites. At a crucial time, you just created a void. I'm glad it's back, but I got a poor response from the challenge on Investor Relations. Stephen is...

So we obviously needed a period when we actually had news and also when people are around and the summer has always been very quiet for investors as well. And there were big gaps when people were on holidays. So although the development continued and the advances in the company, people weren't around every day to put stories up. But we are back, and there's a lot of things to -- not only to catch up on, but lots of new things happening. So I think you will enjoy Soundbites if you follow it now.

Thank you, Stephen. Second question, will you consider taking on a small loan instead of a placing if the share price is too low? I understand you will need to show the wheels turning quicker on revenue from Elevate IO. But if the metrics are good, we will become a sausage machine, cash in one end and beautiful subscribers out of the other. Yes, well said. I think that we would not rule anything out with regards to a raise, but I don't think that taking on debt would be top of our list. So I think that, that would be a very unlikely. Third question, will AI turbocharge Elevate IO or eat our lunch and why?

I'm going to say it's a perfect complement for what we're doing. It's something that we use in both helping us produce the tool, but also we're perfectly placed to take advantage of all the disparate engines that are out there. So people who are using AI either for things like generation or for tiding stuff up, we're able to add that into our product and make that available sort of from the platform itself. So there's no evidence at all that AI is replacing the way that tools like ours work. If anything, it's giving just more strength to tools like us. Of course, our competitors have the same advantage as well. So it does mean that we have to do a great job implementing that. It's not for free. But we see it as a net advantage and a good -- another thing that will help bring more people to video editing because traditionally, a lot of the process of video editing can be quite time consuming. The good news is AI can remove a lot of that trouble. So it's a net advantage across the board for helping us build stuff and helping our customers get value from what we build.

Thanks. I think you covered every base there. Marketing seems to have gone quiet. e-mails, videos, PR, podcasts, conferences, et cetera, have all dried up in recent months, and I'm hardly seeing the company anywhere. Is the business now relying entirely on paid advertising?

John, so we still do all of those things. I think the reality is we're a lot more deliberate now and purposeful with each of them, where we use them and specifically kind of what opportunities we do -- we say yes to. So we still do a lot of e-mail campaigns, which is much more highly segmented in the way that we do that now. So we're delivering the right message to the right people at the right time rather than broadcast continuously. Digital PR is definitely something that we've pulled back on over the recent months, but we'll be investing in as we move forward, particularly now as we double down on kind of product updates moving into Q4, particularly where we've got big announcement like text animation coming through. And in terms of events and conferences, again, we are doing those things but on a much kind of more -- a smaller, more deliberate and intimate level at this point. And quite -- over the last few months, we're doing a lot of experimentation as well with different channels, so kind of smaller experiments, smaller scale budgets to test our way into different opportunities. So it may not appear as broadcast as perhaps it has done in the past because we're following much more of a kind of test and learn approach into where we put our investments.

Great. Thank you, Ness. Question from Nick, to Sumit. Not so much a question, just a congratulations on your appointment to the board. It gives investors exactly the confidence they need and I would offer my congratulations too. I am sure everyone does. I think the other thing to notice we also will be looking for a non -- an independent non-executive chair to join the board as well. We are actively recruiting that position now. So I think there are some questions around my role as executive chair and I think that's -- absolutely I would agree with them. And I think that it is good that we have an independent non-exec chair to actively recruiting. 120,000 users, 3.4% conversion rate. That will be just over 4,000 converted paid numbers, yet subscriber numbers are in the 900s. You mentioned a churn of approximately 11%. Can you please explain the mismatch? Yes. The 3.4% is -- that is the snapshot of where we are now. It is not the -- Where we have been since February 2025 when we launched the payment gateway. We have been increasing that conversion rate all the way up, and it has really started to gain some recent momentum now. So yeah, that explains the calculation, the mismatch that you have got. Please let me know if there is any more questions on that. Does the company generate any margin on third-party tokenized sales, such as music, or is the cost simply an actual cost we pay to the provider?

No, there's margin on -- it depends on what it is. But there -- and remember, we're adding a lot more tools in the future. So some can be high profit, some obviously which are slightly more commoditized. There's no point us being able to offer a service if they can buy it elsewhere a lot cheaper. So we make money where we can, and where it's value to the end user.

Please break down the operating cost in corporate and Elevate. Highlight any non-cash amounts in both. What is the GBP 525,000 trade payables payment for? I'll take this line -- this question off and we'll -- we can reply to you in writing, where we are able to. As you can tell, we don't have a CFO sitting at the table right now. So we'll get back to you on that one, Jared. Question from John. Ian, the share price has fallen sharply for years, yet you've been chairman since Anne left 18 months ago. Do you think this is appropriate? Well, I've just addressed that just before. So no, we're actually looking for an independent non-exec chair as we speak, John. So yes, I agree that there's a requirement for that. Will the new Google Book be supported? Yes, it will.

Yes. We've done another important part actually of the work that we've done on the engine, is to ensure that the product works well on low-powered machines because we know it's a great opportunity for us. And as the higher-end NLEs work more -- have more and more demanding, they require more and more memory, more and more GPU support. We're at the point where we're actually being able to fulfill people who have lower spec machines. So we very closely work with on things -- any of the Google Chromebooks or any of the lower end, including Ian's reading the questions of an Apple Neo. We're constantly testing, for example, the performance on that as well.

Good. There's a few more Board questions about me doubling as Chairman, which I think we've answered now. That's -- we will move on from that one. As Blackbird EBITDA positive and forecast -- sorry, as Blackbird is EBITDA positive and forecast to be for the rest of 2026, is it possible to sell a share in this entity to fund Elevate? Because we share such common DNA at the back end, I think that's always going to be a challenge. So Stephen, would you want to comment on that?

Yes, I think both sides benefit from sharing the technology, but it would be very hard to split off one. And also with Elevate now starting to grow quite strongly, I think that's where the focus of investment will be from our external people.

Lots of us are worried about the runway, which is nearly used up. The share price has fallen as low as 1p under Ian investors-backed people. Why would anyone invest now given the company's performance? Thank you very much Paul. Well I've just pointed out that the revenue engine is improving dramatically, and we are working hard to improve that further, and continuing our strategy. At this point in time, we are monitoring the cash position. We have talked about changes at the board level. Yeah, I think we have answered that question. Since bringing on board the Chief Marketing Officer, what data information have you observed about the awareness of Elevate as a product in the marketplace, the competition and the slowness of trial to conversion rate users? Is there any way to improve the awareness and conversion rates?

Well, the conversion rates as we've already spoken about have been improving month-on-month over the last few months as we've been kind of implementing some of the insights from the research we did at the beginning and continue to do ongoing. So from that perspective, that's a constant work in progress and something that we are always looking at and looking for ways to improve. From an awareness perspective, again, I think when you look at the rates of growth month-on-month, we can see that, that is also developing as well and we'll only continue to do so as we start to expand into more channels and kind of broader awareness channels. We've certainly been focused over the last couple of months on making sure that we're capturing as much of the active intent in the market as possible. And we'll continue to be broadening that out to kind of new pockets of the market. But being very kind of selective about where we place ourselves that we can be focused on fewer opportunities to create more awareness within communities or target groups rather than spreading ourselves kind of too thin, which would ultimately damage our conversion rates.

Thanks, Ness. Ian, could you tell us how instrumental the Scale Up collective have been? Is the recent growth largely down to their marketing work? Well, I'll refer back to the slide I did at the beginning, which is it's really about the improvement of the entire machine. We've got huge improvements, very impressive improvements to the product. A change and a step-up, I think, in terms of marketing. So that's definitely had an impact. We've also made some changes to how the trigger points happen. So we reduced the number of exports you can have from 3 down to 2, which definitely had an impact as well. So I think it's really about improving the machine, fine-tuning the machine, and we will continue to look at how we can do that. Question from Paul. How out of the paid new users, are these mainly marketing customers being targeted or creators?

It's a combination. We -- certainly from -- where the majority of our spend -- active spend at the moment goes on PPC. We see a kind of a broad spectrum of different segments coming through those channels. That's based on active intent in the market, and we see that spread across hobbyists creators and teams. What we can see is that teams convert to paid plans at a higher rate than other segments, which is really interesting and something for us to kind of continue monitoring. And we're actively targeting marketing teams through some of the other activities that we do. So we have a partnership series at the moment, which is a combination of events, podcasts, panels and speaking opportunities that we're running that actively target those groups that started last quarter and will continue into this quarter.

Thanks, Ness. A question from Simon on the Exec Chair role again, which we answered. Have you considered alternatives to shareholder dilution? If so, what? At this stage, we are looking to fund raise with equity, and we have considered some options, but we haven't proceeded with those. Question from David. Could you talk about how your interviews and market analysis dictate your product road map? Maybe that's a question for both of you.

Yes. I mean all of the interviews that we do, we've rotated some of the interview processes between product and marketing so that we can kind of take a little bit of a different kind of spin on that each time. But also we always share the findings collectively between us because ultimately, the learnings we take those have implications for both sides in terms of understanding why people come to Elevate, what they're looking for, what problem they were trying to solve and they were searching for it and ultimately what value they're getting out of the product. And yes...

Yes. I think it's also important to remember the idea for Elevate wasn't just dreamt up within the four walls of Blackbird. The idea from it came from extensive research that was -- and conversations and the market in general as well. We've always -- we're not the only people with this idea. Other people also support the idea of an online video editor. And so we've always throughout the process from before we wrote the first line of code, we already did a round of interviews with different groups, and we continue to check in often with those same people as the product developed. Some people have been on this journey with us for 4 years from before we began. So we've always had a healthy amount of feedback coming from the market in general. And what's encouraging is how we're seeing people who saw it at the beginning and how they're reacting to the different changes that we've made. I mean it's wildly a different product than it was a year ago. It's hard to see that often when we're sort of all involved in it day-to-day and even with the quarterly updates that you guys get. But if you actually look back at where it was a year ago, it's just a wildly different -- its capabilities are completely different. So we keep that loop going, and we'll continue to do that.

Good. Thank you. A question from Reece. The EVS contract is up for renewal. Can we expect a significant increase in the minimum guarantee contract of GBP 2 million or EUR 2 million? There was this time around. Has talks for renewal begun yet? Early talks have begun. Can we expect a significant increase? I don't think so. I think if we get the same deal again, that will be amazing. I did talk to them at IBC recently, and they have had quite a lot of new interest in the product that Blackbird is a part of, which is encouraging. So yes, discussions will continue. How far behind your closest competitors is Elevate in terms of subscribers and revenue base? How far behind your closest...

I mean financially or...

How far behind your closest competitors at Elevate in terms of subscribers and revenue base?

I think it's how far are you behind your closest competitors?

Well yes.

I mean there is a huge -- I mean, obviously, there is a very large player in the market indeed and they have some more slightly more public numbers there. They started before us and obviously have been around a little bit longer. I don't think we know the answer to how many competitors others have -- sorry, how many subscribers others have, but it is still such a beginning of a new market that we're off to the races, but it's still all to play for.

Curious one, the next question. and to Streater and the Board, it appears that Ian's daughter did an internship at Allenby recently. Ethically, that leaves a bad taste. And from the outside, it looks like a conflict of interest in what is supposed to be an independent advisory role. Is the Board aware? So yes, my 17-year-old daughter did 2 days work experience at Allenby. I don't think that unpaid, obviously. I don't think that contravenes anything other than the fact that she was getting some experience that she had experience in cafes and elsewhere. I don't know whether you want to comment on that.

It's not material when you look at...

I would hate to say these questions are sinking to a new low, but perhaps that's the moment. Okay. Question from David. Does your animated text development work across voice to text?

Work across voice Yes, it will. Sorry, yes. Yes. So if it's to do with, yes, how it will work within subtitles. Then subtitles will also be improved to support the -- yes, capabilities -- animation capabilities.

Ian, your salary of GBP 0.25 million looks out of step with the company performance. A follow-up from a question at the AGM. Could you please tell us on your day-to-day to justify it? Guys, I'm not going to continue to justify my position here. If you really feel that that's what you need, then look, I got voted in 93% renewed in June. I'll refer back to that. Grant, congratulations on his appointment to the Board. Yes, congratulations. John, the AGM put a lot of weight on the move from Google to Meta. How many paying subscribers is Meta bringing in compared to Google? And what's the difference in cost per acquired paying customer?

So we're still doing -- we're still testing with Meta at the moment. We've been doing some comparisons when we have Meta running alongside Google. What we're seeing is that Meta is as purchase journeys tend to go, people have multiple touch points before they make a purchase. Meta does play an active role in that journey as we're seeing. It's kind of one step in the journey and allows us to reach new audiences in different environments. What we're going to be focusing Meta on in the short term is kind of remarketing. So focusing on using Meta to target users that have signed up to use Elevate, but not yet subscribed alongside a slightly broader audience as well, that we will then be able to use lookalikes kind of combine to appeal to the right audience. In terms of the difference in cost per acquisition, it's complicated because they often contribute to the same purchase journey. So we look at Meta as a contributed attribution in terms of the role that it plays in acquiring customers. So generally speaking, we look at blended customer acquisition costs to give us an overall view of -- how all of the channels we're running work together and to make sure that they're working efficiently as a system and not cannibalizing each other.

AI question. There seems to be a trend of connecting Claude/chatGPT to video editors with Premiere and MCP. What are your thoughts on Elevate doing this?

So we do have some developments that are happening in that space that we're working through in terms of how we use agents to actually operate and influence the edit for things like removal of ums and ahs and recutting things. So we've got some good experimentation going on in that space. Of course, it's going to be very, very useful, as I mentioned earlier, for helping speed up the production process. We definitely will embrace that, no question.

You've recently written some Elevate blog posts about CapCut and Descript. Why have we chosen for that moment now?

A couple of reasons really one that from -- we have a big focus on kind of increasing and driving our organic share of traffic volume to the site. And that kind of lower down funnel conversion type content helps us support that. We can also see that people are looking for comparison content. That blog content is also useful for feeding AI and LLM discovery, again, where there are often comparisons or we are providing those systems with mutual comparisons for them to draw on in the citations of Elevate.

Thanks Ness. Why did Steve White leave so suddenly? A CFO and director departing now with a runway running out signals a lack of confidence. Steve had been here seven years. He had been here a long time. It was not actually that suddenly, and he decided he wanted to do new things. We are actively recruiting a new interim CFO who -- we are not actively, we have actually confirmed one who will be starting on Thursday. We will put the news out about that when the ink is dry. We will be getting a new person on very soon. The share price is down 90% over the last five years. Where is the accountability for this happening? We're building a -- Reece, thank you very much. We are building a brand new product from a more or less greenfield site out in the open market. It is an unusual thing to do. It is a difficult thing to do. These products are generally built behind closed doors in Silicon Valley in a VC fund, as I have actually said this before, and I think it is still very much, very much true. So the market does not often give a lot of patience for those kind of things. But the happy news is that we have got ourselves to a point now where we are growing quickly, where the revenue engine is starting to take shape, where growth is starting to be exponential, and I think that is a happy thing to be that we should be happy, be celebrating. We have got to get to the point now where that is a positive increment rather than just getting closer to being parity. But we're in good shape. What is the current average income per subscriber? Are you getting increased numbers of teams at $100 a month?

I mean the majority of subscribers at the moment are with us are on the creator plan with more and more moving up to the creator plan. I think Pro at the moment, the top end [ 100 ] per month. We see quite a lot of people who are particularly working in teams using the creative plan and the limits within that at the moment as they're kind of experimenting with products and deciding whether it's going to kind of formally come into their tool set. And really, that's the point at which we see those commitments at the higher monthly cost, that's still very much work in progress.

EVS is now also using AI to further enhance its product offering to customers. Is enterprise adding AI capability to the Via Create app in order for it to be competitive with customers' changing needs? Yes. Well, we talked about this when I met them recently. They are using some AI capabilities to do highlights editing. But for the fine editing within Via Create, they're using Blackbird-based codec tools. So that's -- we're kind of a blend with them. We don't have any plans at this stage.

We won't be doing it directly, but remember that EVS have written their own editor, a bit like we've written Elevate -- so they will control how they implement that interface and the external integrations, and we provide the platform, the base platform that they build on.

Thank you very much. Is AI threat to Elevate now or in the near future?

No. As I answered before, it's a great complement.

And Adrian Wilding appeared to have left for the interim CFO role after only 3 weeks. Yet the [ RNS ] said he moved to a permanent position. Why would an interim leave on role for another? Can we please be honest with investors? Adrian got a great offer from another company. Without divulging too much about the other company's situation, something very unfortunate had happened over there. I don't want to be the one to talk about that, but we will be as honest as we can. If we said that it was a permanent position, and it's an interim one, my bad. I didn't realize that was the case, but I'm glad that he's got a great role. How many marketing teams have we signed based on the current increase of subscribers apart from shows how we are directly infiltrating this PAM?

So I'll have to look at the -- take out the exact numbers. I believe for August, about 10% of subscribers fell into that category. And we've been doing quite a lot of work or we are working closely with a small number of outlets within that space. For example, the marketing meetup, we did an event with them last week. We've got kind of partnership series and plan with them. A couple of other outfits like those where we have syndicated partnerships with them that involve podcasts and panels and speaking opportunities where we actually get an opportunity to sit at the table and talk about industry-related topics and how Elevate fits into those. We're also doing in-person events where we can demo products and get it in the hands of users as well as doing kind of more long evergreen pieces -- content around newsletters and things that will be discoverable over time. So there's a wave of activity aligned to that, but these things take time to build.

Great. Thank you very much. This gentleman says, I've searched for browser-based video editor and all the major AI. And everyone has mentioned except but never volunteers Elevate IO, even when I asked specifically about frame accurate video editors, this lack of visibility is probably not going to help users numbers. Are you aware of this? Do you know the reason and why?

It's again, something we're working on all the time. I think we're seeing about 3x the number of sign-ups coming through AI discovery now since June. So it's building month-on-month. I think we ran for about 41 keywords in AI search at the moment. It's never going to show up in every single search. We need a huge amount of coverage for that to be the case, but it's something that we are constantly working on and building. The thing that's important for us is to focus on kind of trusted citation sources. So that's why a big part of our Q4 investment is going to be going into YouTube, which is increasingly -- YouTube and video is increasingly important for AI kind of LLM discovery as well as things like podcast, digital PR, other kind of areas where we can be cited and resource from. So that continues to be a focus point.

Thank you very much. From David, 914 subscribers as of 24th of September is a good improvement in the quarter along with lower CAC, higher conversion, better retention, the growth engine is improving. Yes, it absolutely is improving, David. Thank you. Given that our ICP is corporate teams and they are a profitable segment, how is growth in corporate teams going? I think that you've kind of answered that.

Yes, exactly. It's something that we have -- where we have a dedicated kind of work stream against a lot of our organic content plays into those groups as well. It's not sales-led strategy. It's a marketing-led motion. So we're looking to capture those through capturing individual users who will then bring it into the organization. And we see that reflected in a lot of the customer interviews that we're doing where we have an individual person starting to use Elevate for their specific use case and are then starting to share content and share internally with their teams. And so that's the kind of loop that we want to try and take a better hold of.

A question from Michael, on current progress obtaining paid users. You're scheduled to run out of cash before Elevate breaks even. How do you plan to address this? We've addressed this in the RNS, Michael, and we will keep investors a address of any plans that we have to do any further raises of funds. At this stage, we don't have a plan. David, "My favorite metric is MAUs and WAUs, so monthly active users and weekly active users to see how intensively the product is being used, i.e. how valuable is it to users? I notice they are absent from today's update. Any reason why no reports of those?" Either one.

Not sure why they're absent.

I don't think -- they are not intentionally absent.

No.

It's quite interesting actually. I think these are actually a good story and yeah, maybe we should have put them in. I did some calculations this morning, and in the month of September, which is, as we know, not yet finished, there are over 7,300 videos that have been made and exported out of the platform. So it's -- and that's just increasing really quickly. Last week alone there were 2,500. So it's -- we don't have that in the numbers, but I would say that it's really showing its value to users.

I think it's fair to say as well, those numbers are obviously sort of top-level KPIs, but we see the traffic in general on everything from storage used and processing power used and just general activity across the board. There's no question that the platform is getting busier and busier and busier. It's -- definitely more is going on continually on a rising scale.

Question about the realistic size of your revenue in the U.K. marketing professionals market, your ICP. How many marketing pros are there in the U.K.? what is your target for percentage of this market signing up for free? What is the percentage of those convert to paid?

I mean when we look at the -- we know from what we're seeing so far that conversions to paid for that segment is about twice the rate of hobbyists and content creators. I think we gave the sizing for that in the annual AGM. We'll have to get back to the numbers in that deck. I think it was around...

200,000 teams.

200,000 teams. And so we're, I guess, still working through exactly kind of what is realistic for that in terms of the percentage uptake, but we do definitely see that they convert to paid at a higher rate.

Thank you very much. Sumit, can you talk about the sector use of AI assistant agents in terms of what marketers are asking for on that front? Do you see Elevate involved in AI assistants in 2027 to improve productivity?

So as I said, we are going to be incorporating AI tools, both AI assist for just one-off little bit. Remember, AI has already been used for things like the subtitling tool, the voice reduction tool. But the most exciting bit is probably how AI can be used, not just there's these day-to-day sort of good housekeeping style useful uses. But of course, that slightly broader use, i.e., being able to take AI and have it generate something, whether that's graphics or other video content or actually do the assembly, all of that we're looking at. And how do we do it from within our product or an agent on the outside sort of talking to our product. We obviously want to bring as much of the experience as we can in-house. So we want it to be -- if you look at some of the very early designs of Elevate going back to 2002, we did have this sort of AI assist button that we believe would be a good thing to have in different parts of the product to actually help you just get by with day-to-day stuff. But of course, the world has changed. And since then, the LLMs have really grown in their capability, and we definitely want to embrace that as well and have it so that we haven't named our AI agent yet, but there will be a AI agent, Squires or someone else who's running alongside you during your edit and able to let you -- get assist you in getting the whole thing together.

Thanks, Sumit. What is your target for CAC, ARPU, LTV and churn? We're not publishing every single piece of data right now, Colin. But each time that we do a presentation we'll try and give you a little bit more in terms of this, a bit more color. I think this time we've given a few new numbers, a few new types of numbers. And we'll continue to do that and as we learn more ourselves. We very quickly acquired our first 100,000 users. Indeed, this was when the product was inferior. How do we acquire such a large number but have only had a modest increase in total users from that initial acquisition? I think most of this, Reece, is down to geography. When we very first started marketing the product, we did a lot of India and Philippines experimentation. We brought a lot of users on from there who didn't really convert to pay. Since then, we've really focused down, doubled down on the U.S. and the U.K., which is obviously a different price range in which to acquire, but obviously have a much higher propensity to pay. That's probably the main reason for that. This is a long one. Should you conduct another placing to raise growth capital in the coming months? Would you consider using the recently introduced AIM Capital access window? Where shares are temporarily suspended during the block booking process. This seems particularly suitable for volatile AIM-quoted stocks such as Blackbird, where the market price often falls due to the placing. During the placing process, the dampening demand for the placing and [ resale ] offer shares. Take a look at Reynold. Thank you very much. I'm not going to read the rest of it, Tim. That's a very interesting point. We'll absolutely take that into consideration. Thank you very much. William, have you had any affiliate success yet? And is there scope to make the offer more attractive? For example, 3 year instead of 1 year, and to be able to make the offer a more -- offer their customers more reduced rate, e.g., 10% off for the first year. Affiliates are not only useful to add users, but also to gain product exposure. I guess that's a question to you one of you...

Yes. I mean, it's something we've kind of experimented very early with so far and something that we'll be definitely looking at to move forward. And yes, we'll be looking at all of that in due course.

Okay. Question from Gerard. Have you talked to private equity about taking a strategic stake in Elevate. I think the market needs that vote of confidence why it has been delayed. Gerard, once we have more news about what we will do in terms of funds, we'll let you know. I don't think it's our time or place to talk about this, but I think that private equity would -- like anything, we would keep our options open. What difference should we expect in terms of decision-making and the direction of the company with Sumit moving from position of MD of Elevate to being on the main Board? Well, I think some deep knowledge and sense at the Board table will be much welcomed. Other than that, nothing else planned at this stage. Are you more focused on the U.K. team users rather than the U.S.A. team users? What is the marketing balance between the 2 geographical markets?

The majority actually comes from the U.S. at the moment. That's a bigger market of the 2.

Can you say more about what you're doing in terms of AI results? I think we probably covered that one off.

Yes, I covered that a bit earlier.

Another question on the share price. I think we've covered that one off. You have over 100,000 users, but very few people seem to discuss Elevate online. Why is this? What do you think?

I mean it depends on who those users are, right? And I suppose what their kind of circles of influence are often as well, discussion on my -- isn't always positive thing. But we do see increasing conversations happening on platforms like Reddit and within kind of closed communities that we monitor and are always looking at ways that we can contribute and influence those discussions. But ultimately, that kind of activity happens with time as people start to experience the product and start to talk about it, which I think as the product developed out over the course of this year, we expect to see more and more of that.

What does the team think the main thing or things that are holding back elevate.io growth from -- well, over the summer terms from kind of the April to middle of July, we were on a marketing freeze. We didn't do any paid advertising during that time. And since we started advertising again in mid-July, we can see that there's been a really sharp increase in growth. So I think at this stage, I would simply say the fact that we didn't market in particular months. And now that we are, I think the growth is looking really good. Congrats to Sumit on his appointment to the Board. Thanks, Nick. Well, agents be able to access Elevate? I think you've already mentioned that one. Target CAC, we will get -- as I said, we'll start to give more information out as we go through, but at this stage, not. Sumit, you spoke about eventually being able to speak to a prompt then create a graphic. Will that be in a forthcoming update?

No, not immediately. It's a really important piece of the work though because as ever, we know that the video generation market is quite saturated, and it's great, but it's good for Hollywood, it's good for fun and games, but it doesn't necessarily help marketing teams necessarily. We know that the broader market that we're after will benefit more likely from AI to graphics, and that's something that we've been working quite a lot on. And it's an area that others aren't working so much on. So it's a great opportunity for us.

In the spirit of this, I'll read the next question out. Ian, please ignore the trolls. You're doing a great job, but please genuinely consider other financing options other than dilution. I believe a lot of people are holding back to investing, as I said, being diluted at lower and lower share -- share price points. Is revenue financing an option for funding the next marketing push for elevate.io? Well, thank you, Joseph. I appreciate your comments. As I say, when we will consider all options and when we've got some news, we'll let you know. Can we consider any further Board investment during the current open period? Very possibly. Yes, very possibly. When can we expect the next feature drop? I'm excited.

We do feature drops every week. So there are some really important ones which are coming through. The underpinnings of texts are actually going through at the moment. So you may not notice anything different, but there is actually quite a lot of major things going on under the hood. I actually think it's really important to also make the point that this time a year ago, we still had a lot of unknowns around how we were going to do things. Just like lots of companies, until you've done it, you don't know. And what we are glad, and Steve and I talk about this a lot, what we're really glad about is, we've solved a huge amount of the problems that we needed to be able to do the things we need to do. So we now -- we still don't know what we don't know, but we at least answered the things that we knew we didn't know about. And there was always confidence going into this that we can build an online video editor. What there wasn't -- what there were still unknowns around was exactly how we would handle some of the things, which we knew we would need like graphics, like better texts, like animations, like other integrations. And I'm really pleased to say we have definitely have a handle on all of the major aspects of what we're doing. Now of course, when we started out, LLMs weren't a major thing, for example. So we know that the market is going to change. And I'm not saying that there aren't things that will crop up that we will then, of course, need to go and figure out how to do. But we are in a position where everything that we want to do, we know how to do. We just need to do it and do the cycles and keep improving. And as I mentioned earlier, every time we add something, we don't expect an overnight flurry of huge boosts of users. Everything is just an additive improvement that just widens that conversion number more than anything. And of course, with that, and especially with things like text, when there's more of a complete package, that's when we do expect more commentary around what we are as a tool because at the moment, it's still just a little bit too niche. But of course, in due course, when we do make these feature drops, there will be a real increase.

Thanks. Coming from GR. Ian, are you in awe at the [ ADVFN ] Warriors record being unbeaten at hide and seek? Yes, indeed, I am in awe of it. It's amazing how hidden people could be sometimes. Right. Okay. So is the player ever going to be launched?

Yes, it will be eventually. And I've discussed this with Sumit for many years. The Elevate product is such a big product that we focused on that, on the editor specifically. But it's always in the Elevate road map, has always been, to have distribution as part of the solution and the player or technology from it will be a big part of that. Obviously, the whole of Elevate is based on the player. So people are seeing it for a specific thing that is further down the line. In the meantime, we use it for development. It's actually available in the product as a [ beta ] and quite a few people use it for their own purposes. But it's not the thing that we're doing next in Elevate as a stand-alone product.

There's a couple of questions on targets here, which we will get -- when we get to the point where we feel more confident, we will put those targets out, but we're not there yet. So I'll read them all out. But yes, standby for that. You mentioned -- so how is the infrastructure coping with the increased demand?

No problem at all. We use AWS as our host. If we are saturating AWS, then that's a great problem to have. It won't happen. We're standing up really well. This product was designed to scale. We've obviously made sure that we had things in place and we continue to improve. So a big part of the improvement that had to go in ahead of the graphics work, which you're going to see drop is, for example, our move towards doing some of the processing in the server side on GPUs for things like export. So that's going to get faster for the end users. It will get cheaper for us. So that's actually an important one is that whilst our usage of the data center is going up and the amount of activity we have, the cost is actually going down. So we're getting more efficient. We're getting better able to handle the load that we have to do. And obviously, as time goes on, we will be continually sort of tuning the way that we do things to make sure that our cost base goes down even if the usage is just really going up.

It's worth mentioning that a couple of things. When we did the original cloud, we would increase efficiency instead of increased capacity. So we were sort of pretty well on the same capacity as the usage doubled and doubled and doubled. And now we're starting to apply that principle and some of the technology into Elevate. But it's not just a question of just paying twice as much to get twice as many users. There's dozens and dozens of incremental improvements to the efficiency. And as Sumit says, more efficiency also means more responsive and better performance, better experience. And well, I mean, AWS isn't going to run out capacity, but we've got a lot of efficiency improvements we can add, and we've been doing that as the usage has risen.

Thanks, Stephen. It's a very good news story in that area, I have to say. A question from [ Downes ]. I'm a big fan of your work. On the upcoming features Sumit has talked about, which, based on your research, do you expect to have the most impact, i.e., what is most in demand?

I think the text animation work that's coming out is going to be really interesting. We talk a lot about the proposition of Elevate, kind of one aspect of Elevate proposition being the fact that it brings a lot of the elements that you need to create great video into one kind of user experience, kind of one world. And text animation is a great example of that where currently, people are using kind of separate caption apps a lot, which are completely really not as good as they look like they could be. And actually, what the team has built in Elevate is amazing. And I think that gives us quite a good opportunity to really push on that part of the proposition. The other aspect that we know from the research that we've been doing with users and this spans quite a lot of different types of personas, user personas is that the other great thing about Elevate being browser based kind of very easy and intuitive to use and the combination of different kind of parts of the tooling process for video creation is that it gives people more kind of freedom to be creative and to create content rather than kind of having to manage tools and systems and clunky connections and things like that. And whilst there's a lot of -- the rise of the template based editors like CapCut and so forth in the market, actually, a big frustration with those is that you're kind of shoehorned into a particular way of creating video or working from templates whereas Elevate gives you a way to create whatever you have in your mind easy and simply with the tool set available. But at the end of the day, you're building from scratch whatever you have as your vision. And I think, again, text animations is another way that we can really extrapolate out that proposition. And so I think that's really exciting.

Thank you. Question from Thompson. What are the [indiscernible] doing? We never see them or hear anything about them. Well, I can assure you they're very much there. They attend all the Board meetings, and they offer their expertise in the various areas that they have experience in. [ Nick Lisa ] is currently the CMO at Nextdoor, a NASDAQ-listed company. And Yuri has had experience -- extensive experience at YouTube and Google. So both of them bring a fair amount of value at Board meetings. Of course, their roles are not just purely as advisers, but also they have fiduciary duties as well, which they fulfill. Stephen, do you want to expand on that?

Yes. I mean they're around if you need to talk to them. There are many committees that need [indiscernible] on them under [ AIM ] rules. But they're not running the company. Their job is to advise and to keep an eye on things. So that's what they do, and that's probably why you don't see it so much because it's behind the scenes work.

Another question about the Board with other changes, no other changes are planned at this stage. Question from Gerard. If there are 200,000 used target teams in the U.K., what is the equivalent of the U.S. number?

I don't have that number at hand. Maybe we can followup.

Okay. Thank you. Your slide mentioned the new YouTube channel. What will that do to create views? What will that do to create views?

I guess I assume that means what are we going to be doing with that channel? The idea is that we'll have a mixture of different content format and particularly kind of voices through that channel. So one of the key things that we want to do with that is to start to bring other names, faces voices into our world to help us expand the reach of our content and the story of Elevate. So there will be a combination of kind of interviews and content that we create with other kind of industry players. And we'll also be leveraging kind of case studies and stories from that and kind of opening up the window into how people create videos and content and kind of share their tips and advice particularly the easiest way of using Elevate. So we'll be trying to find lots of different kind of niches and pockets of opportunities to capitalize on the active intent in YouTube. And as I said before, YouTube is quite a big contributor to the expectations in kind of AI and LLM discovery. So we'll be looking at opportunistic ways to do that as well in terms of what keywords we want to capitalize on and therefore create content for that.

Thanks very much. Another question for you, I think in terms of to help retain new users, what are we doing to ensure they're aware of the upcoming product features?

We have a couple of different -- we sort of have a playbook that we run through when we launch new product features, which include kind of announcing directly to current users that we segment and through e-mail and in product of kind of notifications or future discovery. And then we broaden that out into kind of more wider publication and broadcast news in terms of updating on our website looking for any kind of search or keyword opportunities off the back of those, and also using our kind of primary channels, social, et cetera, to publish those announcements.

Thanks. Another one for you Ness. Can please talk about how we actively market to our large e-mail list, upselling, not just sending occasional product updates?

Yes, absolutely. It's -- we're doing quite a lot on e-mail. A big push over the last few months has been around really understanding that user base and getting better with segmentation of those announcements and updates so that we're not just sending kind of blast broadcast comms to the whole list, which is actually -- which can actually damage deliverability and things like that being starting to get smarter with who we e-mail, what we communicate with them. And so every month, we have kind of a new -- we look at our strategies for that kind of what we're going to prioritize next. So yes, a lot going on there.

Great. Thanks. There's another funding question there, which I think we've answered. You talked about reducing staffing levels. Have you reduced engineer numbers to save costs? We've certainly taken a disciplined approach to our cost base over the last few years, which has resulted in a number of rounds of reduction. We don't intend to reduce any further. We have rightsized the team, and I think that it's in a good place. Okay. Ness, anything more to add there?

No.

Great post from a video editing company found out in L.A. if you didn't see it. Thanks, Grant. You're always very good at these things, sending us these links. I really appreciate it. I've tried elevate.io before. It's by far the most impressive property codec I've ever experienced and love the responsiveness of how it runs in the browser. Thanks, Grant. That's really good to hear that. Are the marketing team aware of elevate.io's key selling point that the editor owners of footage keep the copyright of their IP as opposed to offering -- other offerings like CapCut?

Yes. We actually have seen this kind of several different spikes and we have kind of keywords and campaigns around competitors and CapCut has one of them Google ads campaigns and probably one of our top four ones, probably for that reason.

Okay. Great. Thank you. And there's a question from Reese. A barrier for smaller hobbyist creators in using Elevate against social sites such as Instagram. It's the real music catalog available. Epidemic has excellent, if not mostly unknown artists. Will Elevate have access to mainstream artists and it's just for 1 minute? Are these artists allowed the same way as Instagram does? I've done testing on my own content when well-known artists from Instagram's vast catalog compared to Epidemic's in every case, the engagement was higher.

We don't have a deal with any music library able to do that. The way it works very differently within something like Instagram, where they're able to reuse known music. So it's a bit of a harder one for us to do actually. It's not possible without licensing known music, which is incredibly complicated to do. So we are unlikely to introduce that. There are other libraries that we did talk to a while ago about that, but it's not necessarily something that's right for us at this stage. It's not going to. People can also license that music from another library that has well-known music and bring it into Elevate and make it part of their edit. So it's not prohibited to do that. But we're not a platform. So we don't have the ability to directly assign music.

Yes. We did explore it and one of the platforms we talked to would to do this on our behalf, but only for certain platforms that it would go on to. So maybe it was YouTube or maybe it was another platform the fact is that we give complete freedom to our users to publish anywhere. So therefore, it's impossible to do that. Okay. That was a lot of fun. I think we're at the end of the questions. Over to you, Jake.

Absolutely, guys. And thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time, then addressing all of those questions that came in this morning. But Ian, perhaps, before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great.

Yes. Well, I think we've done a lot of wrapping up. But I'll just say that we're just delighted with the way that the marketing and the product team are working together to deliver the growth that we've seen over the last few months and may continue . Thank you very much.

Ian, that's great. And thank you all once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Blackbird plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.