Hi, everyone, and welcome to Airtasker's First Half Financial Results Presentation for FY 2026. Really pleased you could join us today because we've got some great results and updates to share. If we move along to slide three. As a reminder of why we're all here, Airtasker's mission is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills.
Creating jobs isn't a by-product of the work that we do, it's our core reason for being. Really pleased to say that since inception, we've done over AUD 1 billion in jobs completed with over five million tasks completed in Australia alone. We are seeing some really significant impacts from AI across every business in the world today.
I'm really pleased to say that Airtasker is well positioned to thrive in the new AI era. We're seeing an operational uplift across the entire company where AI is already driving powerful operational improvements. We're able to use AI to do enhanced customer discovery to be able to find customers at the exact moment they need a task completed.
We're able to use AI to drive enhanced content moderation to make sure that scams and leakage can be removed from our marketplace in real-time. We're seeing rapid product development through artificial intelligence in software development, which is seeing us ship changes to the Airtasker app faster than ever before. Secondly, Airtasker is all about real-world services. We focus on local services like movers, tradespeople, and furniture assembly.
All of these skills require humans and human dexterity, and so they're not easily replaced by autonomous robots. Finally, we are sitting on a treasure trove of proprietary reputation data. Our Reputation Passport datasets combines over 9.6 million transaction verified reviews, which gives us a truly unique inventory of local service providers that can't be bypassed by artificial intelligence agents.
Some highlights before I pass it over to our CFO, Mahendra. We're seeing during the first half, 18.9% Airtasker revenue growth. Group revenue grew to a record AUD 29.1 million. What's really exciting is that we're seeing that re-acceleration of GMV growth, which was up 11.3% for the half to a record AUD 116.4 million.
International grew 115% over PCP, and that was a big contributor to our revenue growth. The UK was up 85% on PCP. The US was up about 380% on PCP. We're seeing every sign that we need to see to be very confident these markets are taking off. Thirdly, we delivered our fifth straight half of positive operating cash flow, up AUD half a million.
That leaves us with AUD 27.1 million of cash on balance sheet, and sets us up to be in a really strong position moving forward. On the next slide, I wanted to share a couple of images about Airtasker's great brand work. On this slide, you can see our collaboration with the Australian Open.
You can see Airtasker brand, the Australian Open, and our wonderful media partners, oOh!media, creating some of these great moments which help to drive brand salience, of which I'm gonna share an update later on in this presentation. Without further ado, I'm gonna now pass it over to our esteemed CFO, Mahendra Tharmarajah, who's gonna take us through the financial results for the half.
Great. Thanks, Tim. If you can jump forward another slide, please, Alex. Morning, everyone. I might start by a bit of a recap on where we said we'd go through FY 2026. At the start of the fiscal, we provided some guidance of what we wanted to try and achieve over the course of FY 2026.
At the halfway mark, it's a good opportunity to kind of recap and see where we're tracking. The first one was we were going to deliver double-digit revenue growth in Airtasker Australia. We've done that, 4.9% for the half. Pleasingly, our Airtasker marketplace, so that includes not just Australia, the Australian Airtasker marketplace, but the US and the UK as well, delivered 18.9%.
For those of you who've been following the story, you'll recall that, at the full year, we were at 18.3% for the Airtasker marketplace. The trajectory is definitely heading in the right direction. We talked about the fact that we would generate increasing cash flow out of the Australian marketplace.
We've done that at the half year, AUD 7.7 million. We finished the full year at AUD 15.2 million. That's up 28% on the comparative period. In the U.S. and the U.K., our new markets, we're accelerating our growth trajectory.
It is a seasonal business, so we are in the low season or just come out of the low season for those two marketplaces, but we still delivered 85% growth in the UK and 380% revenue growth in the US. Obviously off smaller bases, but still heading in the right direction. Cash and term deposits on balance sheet, AUD 27 million.
You will recall that we did a capital raise in November, about AUD 9.5 million. The net of cost was about AUD 9 million. That's obviously added to our balance sheet reserves. We finished the half with just under AUD 21 million of our prepaid media assets.
We have prepaid media assets with our media partners in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. are still on balance sheet to use over the course of the balance of this year and going into FY 2027. We also flagged we were looking at what we would do strategically with Oneflare. At the start of this month, in February, we implemented a number of initiatives to address the revenue and profitability of that business.
We're focusing on our more profitable job categories in that marketplace, which has enabled us to really refine and focus our performance marketing spend and also optimize our lead pricing for the leads that we're generating for our customers.
That enabled us to also reduce our head count as we were focused on a smaller portion of the business. Next slide please, Alex. To step back, as Tim mentioned, group revenue was up 13.5% to AUD 29 million for the half. Going back through the components of that, the Airtasker marketplace at just under AUD 26 million, up 19%. Airtasker Australia, which is still the core of the business, 13%, AUD 23 million.
The Airtasker international marketplace is predominantly the U.S. and the U.K. marketplace, up 115% for the half. Next slide, Alex. We've had a lot of questions around the seasonality of the business and how that impacts our revenue and accounting expenses and then the cash flow.
We thought we'd provide this slide as a bit of information to try and get everyone's heads around how the components of the business work. At the top you can see the Australian marketplace is generally. It's a seasonal business, so we see stronger demand in the warmer months of the year, so spring and summer in the southern hemisphere in Australia, which is our fiscal Q2 and fiscal Q3.
We generally see stronger revenues and hence stronger cash receipts. Our costs are largely stable through the course of the year. Marketing tends to move around a little bit, but most of the other costs are fixed, including the fact that we're covering all our global head office costs out of Australia in that Australian number.
If we then look at the UK and the US, our new markets, their strong demand is in their spring and summer, which is basically the fourth quarter of our fiscal and the first quarter. You can see there that, you know, revenue is stronger. We also spend a lot of our marketing investment in those markets, whether it's cash or contra, certainly goes out in those high demand months.
The nature of the business is such that we are spending more in marketing dollars proportion to revenue as we start to build our brand awareness and build out the network effects in these businesses. Though the UK and the US are largely cash negative in the first quarter and the fourth quarter.
As a group, you can see that the Australian business is really the cash generator and it's supporting the investment into the new marketplaces. We're generating positive cash flow out of the Australian marketplaces and that enables us then to invest that money into scaling into the US and the UK. Next slide, Alex. Turning to Australia again.
As we mentioned, up 13% for the half, about AUD 23 million. We also had a record GMV in the half year, just under AUD 104 million, up 6.5%. We continue to improve our monetization rate, sitting just above 22%. We had a number of initiatives through the course of the year to improve that monetization rate.
We've expanded our marketing activities in some of our non-core markets like Perth and Canberra, with our partnerships with ARN and oOh!media. We've also seen, pleasingly, improvements in our brand salience. One of our key metrics that we track in terms of the above the line brand marketing is brand salience.
That's up 32% on the prior period, and again, supported by the partnerships with oOh!media and ARN. Turning to the UK. As I mentioned earlier, 85% growth in revenue for the half. GMV trending a little bit lower than that at 53% growth. The monetization rate just a touch below where we're sitting in Australia.
Our GMV run rate is sitting about AUD 17 million for the year, obviously at a low point in the year given it's low season, but still up 43% on PCP. We've secured back in October a follow-on investment from Channel 4, our partner in the UK, has been with us now since June 2023, bringing their total investment to about GBP 10 million over that time.
We also launched a new partnership at the end of the half with Argos, one of the largest UK retailers, and that joins the long-standing partnership we've had with Dunelm, which is a UK homeware retailer. We're expecting pretty strong seasonal growth going into the northern hemisphere spring/summer season, so the fourth quarter of FY 2026 and the first quarter of FY 2027. Turning to the US.
380% growth, as I mentioned, coming off a very small base. The GMV is moving similarly up 310% to about AUD 2.8 million and a strong monetization rate of 22.5%. We also secured a follow-on investment from iHeart in November that we announced, which has enabled us to launch some new cities, particularly New York and Houston and Phoenix.
We've actually seen a lot of demand in the New York marketplace over the course of the half and the end of last year. Which was a market we hadn't actually launched, but we were seeing a lot of spillover demand and so took the opportunity to implement some marketing activities.
Again, northern hemisphere here, so we're expecting strong growth in the fourth quarter of this fiscal and the first quarter of next fiscal. Turning to our cash flow and our cash position. As we mentioned, positive operating cash flow of AUD half million on the back of 13.5% revenue growth at the group level. That tracks pretty closely with our cash receipts up about 13% for the year.
We don't, you know, we don't have the debtors. Most of our customers pay us up front. Revenue and cash receipts generally track pretty closely. We finished the half, as I mentioned, positive net cash flow of AUD 8.3 million, which includes the proceeds of the cap raise in November.
We are planning on investing money into marketing in the U.S. and the U.K., and we did flag that as part of the capital raise process that we intended to use $5 million to increase our marketing activities over and above what we'd already planned in the U.S. and the U.K. We're expecting the underlying group cash flow for the full year will be. Or sorry, was $1 million for the half.
At the end of the half, we had $27 million of cash on balance sheet. That gives us, you know, the optionality, as I mentioned, to invest in the U.K. and the U.S. marketing activities, but also settle the convertible notes we have that are expiring in June and July.
We have currently accounted for the convertible notes with oOh!media and ARN as being equity settled. We retain the optionality to either repay those notes in equity or repay them in cash. We have the capability on the balance sheet or capacity on the balance sheet to do that at the appropriate juncture. We haven't made any.
The board certainly hasn't made a decision on what they want to do, and we will decide that closer to the date. Next slide please, Alex. Looking at the Australian. Sorry, back one please, Alex. Just looking at the Australian business and how it generates cash to invest in the UK and the US. Our Australian marketplaces, as we mentioned, are cash generative.
You can see there from the table, the Australian market cash flow is about AUD 18.6 million. That's really the operations of the Airtasker marketplace and the Oneflare marketplace. That was up about 10%. No, 11% for the half. It tracks relatively closely to the revenue growth. You can see there 8% up, half on half. We then are able to cover our global head office expenditures.
This is the cash expenditure incurred on running the platform, the engineering teams, the back office teams running a listed business. That was relatively flat growth in that line. We generated about AUD 7.7 million after covering all our head office costs, which was up about 28% on PCP.
We use that money to invest into the U.K. and the U.S. Predominantly, our cash investment in the U.K. and U.S. markets is in marketing alongside the contra media we have with our media partners. We obviously maintain sort of small teams in each of those markets, just a couple of people. Next slide please, Alex. I think I'm handing back to Tim now.
Awesome. Thanks, Mahendra, for articulating some great results based on some really solid performance during the half. As a reminder of our growth strategy. We have a three-point plan, which is to invest into our core platform to maintain our brand and market leadership position. To use this platform to generate profitable growth in the Australian market to generate cash.
Then to take that cash and invest it into scaling in the U.S. and the U.K., leveraging that same platform investment that we have built into the Australian market. Doing it alongside some great media partners like iHeartMedia in the U.S. and Channel 4 in the U.K. Going into the first part of our investment into the core platform.
During the half, we invested into brand salience via our partnerships alongside oOh!media and ARN. This generated us a really strong return on investment in terms of our brand salience. What did we do? We engaged a marketing analytics firm called Mutinex to develop us a hierarchical Bayesian MMM. MMM stands for Marketing Mix Model.
Basically, it's a way for us to ingest thousands and thousands of data points around our marketing investments and to be able to create a predictive model of what the return on investment is. Really pleased to say that during the half year, alongside ARN and oOh!media, we were able to deliver a 32.1% increase in unprompted brand awareness. That's really the measure of brand salience.
That's when we ask people, "Hey, when you need a handyman, who do you think of?" We had 32.1% more people saying immediately, "I would choose Airtasker." In addition to that brand investment that we made, we've also been able to see through the MMM that in terms of direct incremental ROI during the period, for every dollar we spent, we were able to generate about AUD 4.85 of GMV.
Or in direct robust terms, we're generating about AUD 1.08 of revenue for every dollar that we spent during that period. In short, what we're seeing is that the marketing that we're doing is paying for itself in the very, very short term.
I think more importantly is building a long-term brand asset which continues to deliver us growth half on half. During the half, we saw a record GMV which grew to AUD 103.5 million. That was about 6.4% up on the prior year. What's really exciting about that is we're continuing to see that acceleration and momentum in the GMV growth happening from half to half to half.
We're continuing to see that into the second half of FY 2026. Really excited about that too. Onto the second real strategic goal that we have in our core platform investment is to address platform leakage and continue to drive purchase frequency.
One of the ways that we're doing that is through our rebooking model. Rebooking is about when a customer's already connected with Airtasker through our platform, how are we making sure they come back to Airtasker and put all their transactions through our marketplace again. We've made some great progress here.
We launched AI-powered digital business cards which sit on the customer's home screen and enable them to have one place that they go to for their cleaner, their plumber, their handyman. We launched a revised Tasker rebooking interface, which more than doubled Tasker responsiveness, and we revised fee pricing so that it's 1.9% service fee and a flat AUD 5 connection fee, making it really great value for customers on our platform and to really drive rebooking volume.
As a result of all that, we've seen rebooking volumes actually increase by about 40% on PCP. We also invested into AI-powered leakage and scam reductions. During FY 2026, we implemented a content moderation system powered by AI, which can basically find where there's photos, there's conversations, any of this leakage happening, and it can instantly delete that content.
That resulted in both a direct GMV uplift, but I think more importantly creates a really powerful brand equity or increased marketplace trust, which has long-term benefits. Thirdly, in terms of core platform investment, we're investing into generating recurring revenue. We launched a few days ago, about 10 days ago, an Airtasker membership model.
The way that the membership works is that you pay an AUD 89 annual upfront subscription fee, and that enables you to have unlimited tasks with no connection fees being charged. That saves customers up to AUD 49 on each task that they do, and it renews automatically every 12 months.
We're creating this recurring stream of revenue. We're gonna keep loading up Airtasker Membership with more and more benefits for our customers, for our members, and we think it's a really, really exciting way to reward those high-frequency customers on our platform.
It's worthwhile touching on the way that we recognize revenue in relation to our memberships, which is that although we bring in AUD 89 of cash upfront for the membership payment, we recognize revenue across the term of the membership, which is 12 months and that is about AUD 6.74 every single month over 12 months. At the end of that period, the subscription renews automatically again.
It's also worthwhile saying that Airtasker earns fees from both customers and from Taskers. The service fees that are paid on the Tasker side of the marketplace continue to be relevant on each task going forward. Looking forward to the remainder of FY 2026. Airtasker Australia is gonna deliver double-digit revenue growth. I'm really happy to be reaffirming that guidance.
Importantly, we're gonna see increasing contribution from top-line GMV growth rather than pricing or yield related growth. The second thing is that we're gonna maximize the cash contribution from our Oneflare business. As Mahendra mentioned, we made some changes to ensure that we could increase the efficiency of that business and increase the cash contribution that it delivers.
We're gonna see that through for the remainder of FY 2026. We are gonna see our Australian marketplace increase their cash generation. In FY 2025, we saw about AUD 15.2 million come out of our Australian business. We're gonna see that continue to grow into FY 2026. We're gonna see UK and US really start to accelerate their growth trajectory.
We're gonna support that growth with AUD 5 million invested into a disciplined program of marketing investments and to make sure that we're really clear upfront, we're gonna see that result in underlying group cash outflow of about AUD 5-6 million for the full year.
Finally, we've got a really strong balance sheet. We've got over AUD 27 million in cash, and that provides us with that capital to be able to support US and UK marketing activity to really drive that marketplace into some serious growth. It also gives us flexibility in the way that we handle our convertible notes issued to oOh!media and ARN.
As a reminder of that, in the first quarter of 2027, we can choose to either settle those notes with cash, which would be about $5.6 million for each note, or we can choose to settle it in equity as well. This gives us additional flexibility and optionality in what we choose to do in those arrangements.
I'm gonna pass through some cool imagery of the Visa Cash App RB and the way that Airtasker is building our brand salience alongside a global and fast-growing brand, and skip to the thank you slide to say thanks everyone for joining us today.
Obviously, really proud of the results and the whole Airtasker team and pleased to open it up for questions. I also wanna just call out that as part of the presentation, we've upped the transparency on cash flow seasonality.
As Mahendra went through the typical cash flow seasonality. We've also upped the transparency around our media deals. In the annexures of the presentation, which is on the ASX, you can also see a full outline of all our media partnerships. We've also got a worked example of how the media partnerships may be settled over the full period.
Worthwhile giving that a read and, of course, happy to answer questions about any of those parts right here. Handing it over to you, Alex, to help us through some of the questions. Awesome. Should we be repeating the questions?
Yes.
Yeah.
Read the questions out to the group.
Awesome. We've got a couple of questions around share price. I think that we can all agree that the share price has been really, really challenged, and it's a challenging market. What can we say here? First of all, we're really focused on growing the revenue, growing the cash flow and growing the performance of the business.
That is where we are every single day. I am across product, marketing, every aspect of our business to grow our revenue, grow the fundamentals of our business. That said, it's also really important that we start to further engage with our investors. We've brought on an investor relations lead, and we are investing heavily into our roadshows and investor engagement across the two main cities in Australia.
Running things, like, investor lunches, investor education, programs. Also investing into the website Investor Hub, which you're watching the webinar through now, to be able to do CRM, emails, newsletters, all of these things to be able to provide more information to investors. A little bit more about what we're doing with Oneflare.
As Mahendra mentioned, we've taken some really positive steps to increase the efficiency of that business. We've restructured the sales organization to make it more efficient in that way. We also are really focused in on the job categories, lead pricing and marketing, to make it have a more positive impact on Airtasker from a cash contribution perspective. We've not closed that business.
We are continuing to operate that business and to make sure it has the best possible cash impact to Airtasker. Next question: How does the conversion rate of posted tasks and a booked task compare across Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.? What we see is that Airtasker is built on network effects. What that means is that as the liquidity builds, the experience in the marketplace improves as well.
In an early stage marketplace, you tend to get when a task is posted, you'll have lesser people bidding on that task or willing to engage in that task. As the marketplace improves, you'll have more and more tasks happening. As you get more customers, you get more taskers, you get higher assign rates.
For that reason, we see that in Australia it's a very high Assign Rate. In the UK, we've got a growing Assign Rate. In the US we're still in that earlier stages, which is why building network effects is so critical. That's why not only does the posted tasks increase GMV, but also you're seeing the Assign Rate grow over time, which is what really produces that exponential growth effect.
We've got a question here about high-value trade jobs. Airtasker seems to be focused less so on licensed and specialized trades versus other sort of lead generation or like quote advertising type businesses. It's actually quite an interesting observation. Airtasker has, you know, about double the amount of jobs as any of these other platforms. We're the clear leader in terms of posted jobs.
Although we do have a healthy number of people doing furniture assembly or moving or other of these sort of everyday jobs, we actually have a large number of people with specialized trades who are actually verified through our platform, you know, whether it's gas fitting, whether it's plumbing, whether it's electrical. We actually do have a strong position. I think it is a great call-out in relation to Airtasker's marketing and branding, which is, you know, over time leaning more and more towards high trust, high quality trades jobs as well.
Can you set up an ecosystem review content platform around specialized trades where it's hard to find reliable quality tradespeople? One of the things that we've been working on heavily is using artificial intelligence to be able to bring out the best version of people's profiles so that they're able to market themselves and to put their best foot forward when they're positioning themselves for jobs.
In doing so, we've been able to help support people in more specialized trades, bringing to life all of these verifications like trade licenses, et cetera, on profiles. Cool. Alex, follow up that question.
Yes. We've got a question from Stephen. In Australia, it looks like an above inflation uptick in average task price in the second quarter. Any call-outs on this at all?
Yeah. We are seeing some increase in the average task price. A real positive of Airtasker's model is that, as the average task price grows, we earn a percentage of that growth. So as our taskers win, we win too. That has been a contributor to some of the GMV growth.
We expect to see you know that those prices stay steady. I would say that Airtasker in general is a good indicator of, like, future inflation. We're seeing some of this data in real terms. You know, from our perspective as a bellwether to the economy, yeah, we have seen some inflation in the service price.
Next question is from Finola Burke. Tim, could you give us a bit more color around how the Argos relationship works and what your expectations are from it? Is it something you could replicate in the U.S. with firms like Home Depot?
Argos is an enormous retailer in the U.K. If you basically ask anyone who's from the U.K., it's a big part of their you know, their childhood, and it's an absolute stalwart of the retail industry, so it is a massive opportunity. The way that we have structured all of these partnerships is that we use. They focus on distribution rather than like high software integration.
Argos is promoting us in their stores with physical collateral. They're also promoting us on their website and through CRM. When you buy something on Argos that needs assembly or installation, they are contacting customers to let them know that Airtasker is a partner and they can get some.
You know, they can get a small discount to try out Airtasker. We believe there's massive opportunity to continue to ramp up that partnership, so we're continuing to work alongside the Argos team to squeeze everything that we can out of that distribution. There's some exciting changes that are coming up shortly, which we'll be excited to share in our next update.
Is it repeatable into the U.S.? Absolutely. What a lot of these firms realize is that installation and assembly is something that's actually friction to customers buying the product. Partnering with Airtasker enables them to improve their own revenue, but of course gives us a great distribution angle too.
Question in from Benny Moore about the share price decline and you leveraging too much with the marketing costs.
Can you repeat the question, Alex?
In regards to the share price decline, do you think you are leveraging too much the marketing costs?
One of the great things that you'll notice, we've increased our transparency around how our media partnerships actually work. I'd encourage anyone who's interested to have a read through the illustrative example of how the media works. I think overarchingly what's really important about these media partnerships is that they are tied to ultimate performance of those of the media itself.
For example, in the U.S. or the U.K., the more revenue that we generate, the more value that our media partners earn. If there's no revenue that's generated in those markets, the dilutive impact is basically very small. If there is a huge improvement in revenue contribution from that, the cost of the media partnership scales with that.
I think in terms of leverage, we're not actually leveraging more because the media partnerships are very much performance-based.
Question from Paresh: Is there any change to service fee percentage as well as the AUD 89 subscription? When was this rolled out? Any initial numbers that you can share around memberships?
Nope. There's no change to the service fee structure. That is being maintained. On the customer side, we launched memberships about 10 days ago, so if you do wanna Google it, you can go and find Airtasker Membership, and I'd encourage you all to buy one. It's really, really great value. No, the service fees remain the same. It's a customer side membership.
I think you've got some questions there in your chat over there.
Great. This one's for you, Mahendra. On slide 15, do the expenses that are there include the non-cash spend on marketing contra?
No, it's cash only. We backed out all non-cash items in that presentation.
Awesome. Brent, we've got a question. While the international markets are growing reasonably from a revenue perspective, the investment continues to expand as well. Do you have a view on when those international markets will become self-sufficient? One of the really, I think notable things about how we expanded overseas into international markets is we maintain a very lean, fixed cost base.
A s Mahendra mentioned, we have four employees in the U.S. and three employees in the U.K. So we've got a very small fixed cost base, and the variable is the marketing expenditure. What that means is that we've really got the optionality to choose when to dial up more marketing investment or when to bring it back to cash flow generation.
Where we are in the UK, as we reported in June 2025, we're at about a AUD 21 million GMV ARR. We're expecting to see that GMV run rate improve in the second half as we go through the spring/summer high season in the UK. If you can sort of look at where a AUD 21 million GMV ARR is at a 20% monetization rate, you're already generating about AUD 4 million to reinvest back into the marketplace.
Of course, if we can continue to scale that GMV, that number gets considerably larger. We've really got the optionality, I would say, even from now, to turn the UK market towards cash flow neutral or even cash generation.
We think the opportunity to keep expanding that marketplace before we pull it back to efficiency. There's still, you know, a good reason to be in investment phase right now.
Okay.
There's a couple of questions here around the convertible notes. I might just sort of consolidate them. There's a couple of threads asking us how we think about settling the media partnership notes, when we would choose equity over cash. I guess just a general point about the concept of convertible notes.
I think what we would say is, you know, the convertible notes we see them as an efficient cost of capital and largely decisions around whether we issue equity or pay with cash or settle the notes with cash will be a function of cost of capital at that particular point in time. We retain the optionality as we mentioned in the presentation with the upcoming notes to either settle in equity or settle in cash.
The decision will be made depending on the cost of capital or alternatively, what other options we might choose to do with the cash. You know, if we look at these notes, the notes that we issued in the U.S., are essentially at a coupon of 5%, in Australia 5.8%.
That is a very low cost of capital for us in terms of, you know, borrowing money or raising equity capital. We feel that it's quite a cost-effective means of pursuing our marketing activities and investment into overseas markets and the Australian market.
I think also it's worthwhile, you know, just building on what Mahendra just mentioned in looking at, like, how the media partners are ultimately rewarded. When you go through the illustrative analysis that we provided on 3,7 38 in the deck, you can see that it's very much tied to Airtasker's ultimate market capitalization.
Basically, the two, you know, dials that make a great outcome for our media partners is revenue in the jurisdiction in which they are operating. For our US media partners, US revenue. For our UK media partners, UK revenue multiplied by Airtasker's group revenue multiple.
I think what's so important about that is it aligns everyone to wanting the same thing, which is increase revenue in the jurisdiction you're in and get Airtasker's group revenue multiple into a good shape. When those two things work out, our media partners win, but more importantly, we, by default, also win, you know, in even bigger way through those media partnerships. I think they are a very strong cost of capital, but also really, really great alignment of interests.
Interesting. A question here from Paresh: How are the new cities where we've just launched behaving? Are there any new rollouts that we're planning?
Airtasker tends to be a very unintuitive and unexpected type of marketplace. As we mentioned throughout the deck, we started out, you know, really focused on Los Angeles, Austin and Las Vegas. What we started to see is, like, this massive overflow into other markets. As an example, New York as a market is experiencing snowstorms this week, and also about three weeks ago had snowstorms.
We saw an absolutely massive influx of snow shoveling jobs coming to Airtasker. Why? Because if you look at, like, how traditional local services work, it's generally like a fixed supply base. Like, it's like, hey, if the snow shoveler up the road from you is busy, too bad. You can't get your snow shoveled.
What Airtasker enables is to create more opportunity in the market. When you post up your job on Airtasker, hey, maybe the guy who lives two miles down the road is actually willing to drive to your street to do your snow shoveling. You can create all of this opportunity.
As such, we've seen markets like Phoenix, Arizona, like New York, like Atlanta, Georgia, all starting to really have some positive traction. This is one of the most powerful things about having an open marketplace or an open platform is a lot of good things happen, but you do have to create surface area for things to go right.
In short, first three markets are going well, but I think this expansion into via overflow into other markets is really, really exciting as well.
A couple of questions there for you, Mahendra, from Zhi Wang.
Yeah.
How did net swing to negative?
This is largely to do with the accounting for the convertible notes and the media we received. When we received the media, we obviously have an asset that's on the balance sheet, and correspondingly, there's a liability to settle the notes or repurchase the equity if we issued an equity.
As we use the media that's on the balance sheet, that gets expensed through the P&L. We're reducing the asset side of the balance sheet while the liability side of the balance sheet largely stays the same. You end up, you know, reducing your, I guess, your total assets relative to your total liabilities, and we went into negative in the half.
Another question there, Mahendra, from Charlie Song. Group cash flow was negative for the half. Do you have any plans to seek further external funding for growth?
Not at this point. Underlying cash flow was negative. We started the half year with about AUD 19 million of cash on balance sheet. We raised net proceeds of AUD 9 million out of the capital raise that we closed in November, and we still have another AUD 0.5 million to come on that.
We invested about AUD 1 million. We flagged that we are going to be ramping up our marketing activities through the peak season in the U.S. and the U.K. We expect that number, the underlying number to be about AUD 5 million-AUD 6 million over the full year.
We do have AUD 27 million of cash on the balance sheet, so we're quite comfortable that we have the capacity to dip into our cash reserves to fund our growth in the U.S. and the U.K., while at the same time having or retaining flexibility with respect to the upcoming note maturities in June and July.
Interesting. Another question from Zhi Wang. Has the media partnership sold any shares that they obtained as part of the deal?
I assume that reference is to the investment by iHeartMedia in the capital raise.
When we did the last beneficial report a couple of weeks ago, they hadn't. I would say that, you know, they're entitled to sell their shares. It is a volatile equity market at the moment, so each investor will make their own decision around their portfolio and what shares they wish to retain or sell.
That's one of the reasons we also are seeing volatility in our share price. I think, yeah, they're beyond. It's beyond the performance of the business itself. I think there are broader factors at play in the broader equity markets in both Australia and globally.
Question from Charlie Song: What were the initiatives that drove the improvement in your monetization rate? Do you have a long-term monetization rate target?
Monetization rate, just as a reminder, is our revenue divided by our gross marketplace volume. One of the biggest drivers of improving the monetization rate is how many completed tasks to happy customers that we have going through the marketplace.
Again, this aligns us really well with our customers. What's good for customers is good for Airtasker as a business model. By having AI do a lot of scam and leakage detection, we're seeing, like, a lot lesser volume of tasks going through to taskers that don't behave well on the platform, and that is driving an improvement in the monetization rate.
In terms of the long-term monetization rate, I think actually we have a really great opportunity to provide even greater value to customers for things like rebooking and memberships at a lower monetization rate. What that allows us to do is capture more marketplace volume. As an example, Airtasker Membership pays AUD 89 per year as a customer.
If you use us 100 times during the year, then you're still only gonna pay AUD 89. You really didn't pay much of a connection fee. However, we're always generating deals on the other side of that marketplace. What we'd rather have is much higher GMV volume and do that at a monetization rate which is good value for our customers.
While we're not publishing a target for our monetization rate, flagging the pricing changes that we've made for rebooking and for membership is really to say that we believe that there's huge value unlocked by having some of those parts of our business at a lower monetization rate or a lower price rate.
Question from Steve Susi: Can you talk to the rationale around the new city launches, Houston, Phoenix? How much initial investment in new city from your experience is needed to start the flywheel spinning?
It's really interesting. We're seeing so much volume come through organically that it's less of a strategic rationale to go, "Hey, we're gonna launch into that specific city, and we're gonna spend that much to go into that city." What we're seeing more typically is, "Hey, there's a few hundred jobs happening in that city by itself," you know, snow shoveling in New York or in Boston. What can we do to just put a little bit of fuel on that fire and drive some incremental tasks through that marketplace?
I think we actually have the great privilege of not needing to say, "Oh, we need to invest AUD 5 million into that marketplace in a minimum to get it going." Much more of that flexibility to just be able to say, "Hey, if we want 10% more tasks, we can go and invest a little bit more in performance marketing into that." What that means is we can keep our finger on the dial of cash generation versus all our marketplace growth without having to commit upfront to these sort of like janky long-term commitments.
Question from Jay Sladden: What is the cost of the F1 play, and what has it returned to date?
Formula One, under strict confidentiality as to the specifics of that transaction, I can't share the value of the sponsorship. I'd say that, where we have talked to industry professionals, we have an incredibly economical deal. I think most people are surprised by how high-value the partnership is for us.
Why is that a unique scenario? Because Airtasker's actually been really smart about saying, "Hey, we don't actually wanna sponsor the car or the drivers and be, you know, have a little sticker on a car which can cost millions and millions of dollars." We've said, "Hey, you've got these great under-monetized assets.
You've got all these people in the team that are on television being seen by 50 million people a week, and no one's actually looking at them. Because I guess, you know, Microsoft and Google and all of these companies, they wanna, you know, have a splashy thing on a car.
What we're doing is saying, "Hey, let's honor the people who are doing the jobs behind the scenes," you know, the pit crew, the people in the garage, all of these things who are seen on television but are generally under-monetized assets. In summary, we're getting an incredible deal on that. It's been super beneficial for us.
Fantastic. Next question from Branch: Do you have a view on when your international markets will become self-sufficient?
I think we actually already answered that question.
We're gonna move to the other questions over here now. We've also answered that. What's the plan in overseas business expansion in 2026? We've answered that one. Excuse me. Has the company ever considered other methods of advertising like movie advertising and magazines? Can you talk to me a little bit more about the marketing mix?
Yeah. I would say, first of all, engaging our market analytics firm, Mutinex, in all three markets across the world really gives us robust statistical analysis on what's working, and it's really great to see that we're already generating positive, direct incremental ROI in our key market, as well as long-term brand equity, which is often harder to measure.
I think that's the first starting point. Everything's gotta be data-driven and has to be based on statistical analysis of what it's delivering. In terms of alternative methods, we have tried and had some great experience across a whole different range of mediums. In the United States, we've been doing some cinema advertising, which we're seeing have some great effects.
We've also been seeing some great opportunities to do social marketing and social integrations. You might have seen last week, you know, in an unpaid integration, Hamish from Hamish & Andy, you know, posting up about using Airtasker to do jobs.
You also, if you check out Airtasker USA and Airtasker UK, we're seeing some great collaborations with, for example, our LA DJ, Ellen K, who's got sort of 400,000 local followers in the United States, and she's doing a daily giveaway of Airtasker vouchers for people who call in and dial into talkback radio with their task needs. In summary, we're trying a whole bunch of different marketing initiatives.
It's all underlined by marketing analytics, which gives us that robust framework of is it working or is it not working? If it's not working, we drop it. If it is working, we dial it up.
Next question from Paresh: Where do you see Airtasker in five years' time in terms of revenue and number of countries? Any vision for five, ten years?
What we're really focused on at the moment is our next milestone of getting to 1 million customers using Airtasker three times a year with three countries at scale. What's that to say is that our current, you know, dogged focus is on getting the U.S., the U.K., and Australia at massive scale and improving purchase frequency.
If we can unlock that purchase frequency to dial up, you're gonna see a profound impact on the business in terms of cash generation. The cash generation goes up, cost of capital comes down. I think the opportunity to leverage our app and market it into new countries becomes very, very large. I'd say the world is our oyster. There is huge upside.
What's more important, make sure we execute to hit that next goal.
Next question from Paresh: Can you include a slide highlighting all future timelines for coupons and payments? When is the next payment due after June and July 2026? Mahendra?
Yeah. There's an extra C in the slide deck. I think it's slide 36 or 35 has a summary of all the deals. As Tim mentioned earlier, we've included two scenarios for the U.K. and the U.S. in the subsequent slides to provide some education around how these, how the settlement might play out.
I think. Okay. That is, I think, most of the questions. Any last questions that anyone would like to submit?
Look, thank you so much for all of the questions and engagement. This is really what we're trying to do as an organization, is get on the front foot, be there to chat with our investors. You're gonna be seeing that communication, that engagement, our investor engagement continue to dial up.
I really appreciate all of the questions that are here and any of the feedback that you wanna share with us, please do through Investor Hub. Thank you so much, everybody, and looking forward to sharing another update shortly. See you later.
Thanks, everyone.