It's about 90 seconds past 11, so we'll kick off today. Thanks everyone for joining today. This is the first of our quarterly trading updates, which we've now introduced. We were relieved from doing 4Cs because of the sustained positive cash flow. We thought it was best to establish these quarterlies because it was just getting too long between drinks to only do updates twice per year. Looking forward to sharing one of these quarterlies with you in the March and September quarter to offset the in-between months in between the half year and the full year reporting. Usual disclaimer. I wanted to start with an executive summary. Overall, we had a really great quarter where Australian GMV really picked up. Usually this quarter would be, if you look at prior seasonal, would actually be down on the December quarter.
We actually bucked that trend, and we saw our GMV climb to a record AUD 56.7 million just for the Australian business during the quarter. That represented a 17.8% growth on PCP, which was a pretty sharp increase compared to last year, FY 2025, which is about a 5% GMV growth. In the first half of this year, we're at about 6.4% GMV growth. I've been really, really pleasantly surprised and feeling really good about that growth. Most of that GMV growth then flowed through to our revenue growth. You notice that in this half, actually, our GMV growth outpaced our revenue growth, and that was primarily because we didn't make any changes to pricing in this half. A full year has now passed since we last made any changes to the monetization rate.
All of that revenue growth was really being driven by the top line GMV growth. I think this is a really good situation to be in because in the future updating prices and updating monetization is something that we can do once we've got massive usage going through the GMV line. Overall, I think this is mainly a reflection of the brand salience work which we kicked off in September of 2024. It takes about 18 months. We're seeing that the first time we did above-the-line marketing in Australia. We saw that in the U.K. where we launched our marketing in September 2023, and it didn't really produce results until about March 2025. We're seeing the same thing happen as we reignite above-the-line marketing in Australia. As a reminder, we were not doing any above-the-line marketing from about February 2022 to September 2024.
That reintroduction of marketing alongside predominantly ARN and owned media takes some while to build up, but has really, really done well and showing results now and proving out the brand salience strategy this quarter. The U.K. and the U.S. are also tracking along really well. The U.K. hit a new high GMV ARR of AUD 23.1 million, and this is actually in the January, February, March season, which is not the peak season yet. I think as we go to the April, May, June season, we can reach much higher heights in both the U.K. starting that base of 23 and in the U.S., where we're kicking off from 6.7 and I think can make a big difference as we go into the peak season. Importantly, we also launched memberships.
Memberships, as a reminder, the product that we're offering is AUD 89 paid for by the customer and if the customer pays the AUD 89 annual membership price, then there's actually no connection fees for the rest of the year. What that is designed to do is make sure that there's huge incentive for customers to increase their purchase frequency because there's absolutely no friction or cost in keeping all of their jobs on platform. Really, really excited to have launched this. The feedback was pretty incredible. We passed 1,000 subscribers in the first four weeks, and we're continuing to see some really, really positive momentum. I'm excited actually about what we can deliver once we have a full quarter of memberships running with the trajectory and velocity that we've got.
One big call-out on that is that with the utilization of AI-based tools, we were able to get membership out to market in the space of about five weeks. The pace of iteration on the membership, both the product and the go-to-market strategy, has been really, really immense. We've got a robust balance sheet. We've got over AUD 26 million in cash still on the balance sheet. That gives us a lot of flexibility to continue to invest into the U.S. and the U.K., as well as to settle media partnership notes which mature in July 2026. On the back of this performance, really pleased to reaffirm the guidance that we issued in February 2026, and for ease of reference, we've included that guidance again in this brief update pack.
That guidance was essentially that Airtasker Australia is going to deliver double-digit revenue growth and that's going to come even more from GMV growth, which I think we're already demonstrating. Oneflare, we're going to maximize the cash contribution of that business. We made some important changes there to reduce the cost base of that business. We're going to make sure that its bottom line does the best possible job for Airtasker in terms of cash generation. We're going to see Australian marketplace cash flows after head office continue to generate more and more cash this year compared to FY 2025. FY 2025, we generated about AUD 15 million of cash, and we expect that to go up in FY 2026.
The U.K. and the U.S., we're going to make a discrete, an intentional AUD 5 million investment into those markets for the remainder of FY 2026, and we think that can deliver some really, really good proof and traction points over there. Just as a reminder, the U.K. business now at a AUD 23 million run rate as we head into the fourth quarter. I think that's becoming a really significant business, which is really exciting to see and quite close to moving towards that profitability mark. We've got a strong balance sheet. Obviously in February, we showed a AUD 27 million cash balance. We still have AUD 26 million cash. As you can see that U.S. and U.K. investment is going to play out predominantly in the fourth quarter.
In terms of just visualizing that growth, Airtasker marketplaces, 17.3% revenue growth, which was great to see, and are largely driven by a strong Australian market and the U.K. really coming on strong. Airtasker Australia, 17.8% GMV growth became 14.4% revenue growth, and again, gives us a really solid base for the future. Airtasker marketplaces revenue was AUD 1.3 million, but really, as you can see there, the fourth quarter and the first quarter of next year is really where we tend to see those big jumps in the performance of those markets. I won't go into all of the detail here, but we've laid out really what the reasons supporting that strong growth was. Overall, it's a significant increase in booked task volumes coming from our brand awareness campaigns, which drove about a 19% growth in booked tasks, plus a really strong uplift in the average task price.
This is something that is a real feature of the business model, is that when the economy grows, we automatically grow with that part of the economy. Unlike an advertising website where you've got to keep up increasing your advertising prices, with Airtasker, we just grow the Airtasker economy, we are going to earn a percentage of that growth and that value that we create for our users. We are also worthwhile calling out the third bullet point there, which is as our brand salience work has delivered results, we're going to continue to invest into that strategy. I think importantly, we announced Channel Nine as a media partner of ours over a three-year period, meaning that note is to be repaid or settled in FY 2029. I think these agreements have just proven their value to us.
We get immense benefits as a partner of these media partners. Also, I think importantly, from a cost of capital point of view, we're getting the benefits of this media upfront. We are going to repay that over three years. That gives us a massive cost of capital advantage, because the cost of capital for our business, because we've got so many growth opportunities, is very, very high. Paying 4.9% interest on that convertible note is a great model for us. Yes, as mentioned, our unplanned brand awareness was up 33% on PCP, so that is certainly working. In addition, our partnership with Mutinex is to do marketing media mix modeling, and that proves that we have about a 1.08 x short-term ROAS on our marketing. Although we're investing in this long-term branding, we're also getting short-term, immediate results.
In terms of the U.K., we hit a AUD 23 million GMV run rate. I think more importantly is we haven't even started for this year. The big lift really comes in April, May, June. Starting to already see some results from that and very much looking forward to sharing the update in June. In the U.S., it's worthwhile calling out that the FX is actually, obviously with the Australian dollar being strong, the U.S. dollar being relatively weaker, that does make the ARR, which we disclose in Australian dollars, that does provide a delta on that of about 10% or so given the FX fluctuation. Actually, it's a net benefit for us operationally because we're currently in cash investment mode, i.e., we're spending more cash than we're bringing in. The net impact of a strong Australian dollar is a net positive for us as a business.
Really looking forward to, again, sharing the results as we hit the high season in April, May, and June. One of the things that has been a feature of our executive leadership team conversations a lot over the past two or three years, but predominantly really picked up pace in the last six months, is artificial intelligence and AI. I did want to just touch on this point and give a brief update here. The first thing I want to say, which is a really fortunate aspect of our business model, is that Airtasker's value is predominantly in the physical and real world. Physical and real-world skills, which makes up about 95% of the jobs on Airtasker, they're all physical and real world. They're not remote or virtual jobs that can be done through computers.
They're things that are done physically with your hands in real life. These skills are going to become the constraining factor in the economy. If you think about what all of this productivity means in the white-collar universe, it means you're going to be able to do things faster, you're going to be able to come up with plans to go and build things faster, but the constraining factor is still going to be you're going to need a plumber to lay the pipes in the building, which you've now sped up the economy around.
Airtasker's really well positioned to benefit from that growth in the white-collar economy. If you have a look at how blue-collar is, or in real-life jobs are going to be impacted, you can see here that Anthropic's research shows that it's really in software and legal and admin that you're going to see these massive disruptions due to AI, I think in some cases, potential replacement of labor with software. I think that, Anthropic's research indicates, this is not really the case in the real world. That's not to say that humanoid robots and other methods of taking AI and bringing it to the real world aren't on the horizon. I think they are. I also think that it's worthwhile looking at how far into the future that may be.
Also the fact that although some of the jobs at the lower end of physical work may be replaced, and that's already happening. Warehouses have automatic robotic storage systems and things like this. Humans are always just going to get pushed up to that next level of creativity. There's probably going to be more podcasters, more influencers, more people doing things that are in that higher order stack. I think that human labor is still going to be a really, really important thing as we move forward. If we then look at AI disruption from a marketplace or a platform level, rather than at the services level, there's definitely a lot happening in this software area. I think we can all probably agree we're going through this SaaSpocalypse at the moment where companies that sell software are definitely being disrupted.
I think it's worthwhile sort of calling out, if you take a first principles approach, how does that apply to Airtasker? You look at this, and an author, Nicolas Bustamante, put out a great article talking about the moats that exist in software businesses. On the left, you can see on this table, you can see the kinds of moats that are generally not going to be very valuable into the future. You can see these other moats that are going to be really, really important. I think calling those out, it's almost a description of what Airtasker is. The first thing being that Airtasker is predominantly built on network effects.
These network effects are, what makes Airtasker work is that when you post a job, you get three people saying, "I'm ready to do that job right now, close to you." All of that is driven by the fact that you've got liquidity on the supply side of the marketplace, which is driven by network effects. Now, I'm working really hard to work out what the disruption case for that is, because we're trying to red team ourselves to work out how might that get disrupted. As far as I can see, these network effects are very, very powerful and set up a pretty strong competitive advantage/defensive moat. The second thing is embedded transactions. One of the things that Airtasker does that say, hipages and Thumbtack and Angie's List do not do is actually running the transaction.
I think that if you look at what OpenAI did, they kind of went into e-commerce, and they sort of thought about it, and they actually backed out of it. I think what you can see there is that's not the easiest pickings for a horizontal-based AI company. They're not going to go for businesses where you've actually got to manage the customer, manage the money, and be accountable to a customer. They're mainly interested, I think right now, in moving pixels around and having somebody else do all of that hard work. That embedded transactions component becomes very important for us. Then I think the third is proprietary data. One of the things that Airtasker has done is we have found these taskers, and we are giving them the opportunity directly to build their brand on Airtasker.
As they build their brand through their ratings, their reviews, adding their passport, their ID, their verifications to the platform, that becomes a proprietary data set that gives us essentially a unique inventory of work as it isn't available elsewhere. I think all of these things mean that at the moment, I'm sleeping pretty well at night with respect to the direct AI impacts, noting that in the big picture, we're very cognizant of if you don't disrupt yourself, you're going to get disrupted. Overall, I would also say that Airtasker, AI is actually a huge unlock for us as a value driver. I'm happy to actually take any questions around this more directly, because this is something where I think the collective wisdom of all of our investors and stakeholders is actually really powerful to sort of question what we're doing and interrogate it.
The first thing I would say is that we're getting a massive software development efficiency. One of the best things about our business model is that we use software to deliver value to our users, but we don't sell software. As the cost of software gets cheaper, the ability to build software becomes more efficient and more productive, that's a net benefit for us. Basically, it's getting cheaper, we can do more of the software that unlocks the underlying value, which is access to our network, access to our marketplace of taskers. We can do that at a lower cost much faster than ever before. I think rolling out Airtasker memberships was a massive example of this. Also, if you check out what we're doing in recurring and rebooking of tasks, the pace of iteration has just picked up massively. Really, really excited about that.
It's also helped us with content moderation and leakage. We've talked a lot about people using Airtasker. We've got to clean up the streets. We've got to make sure that we don't have a broken window theory. We want to make sure that the marketplace is the most trusted place to buy and sell your local services. One inhibitor to that is all of the scams and the little comments and things that come up on the platform. It's the vast minority of people, but those few people can ruin it for a lot of others. By having AI-based tools which can really learn about this unstructured data, this ambiguous data, we can actually solve these problems, which were previously somewhat unsolvable with deterministic software. Lastly, we're getting a great operational uplift. Our customer support, our query times have dropped massively.
We're able to get back to customers faster than ever before. You're now able to talk in real time to our customer service team via chat. A lot of that is because the back end, the AI-based systems, the back end have been really, really great. If we just come back to defensive modes or competitive advantages, I think I'd summarize it in saying, network effects, the fact that we run the transactions, the reputation or the proprietary data that we have in our marketplace, and then finally, the regulatory responsibility which we take on, for example, providing all the tax information of our users, submitting that to local authorities in Australia, the U.K., the U.S. annually, which is now a law which makes it pretty costly to come in and be a competitor to spin up another marketplace easily.
Thank you so much, and I'm just going to leave it on the cover page, which is something that was a bit of a bucket list moment for the company, which is our first billboard going up in Times Square, New York. If you can recognize those red stairs, Airtasker did a very, very savvy deal to start doing some great outdoor in that market. Thank you again for attending. I can see there's a couple of questions in the chat. There are also some questions that were submitted pre the webinar. I'm going to now go through those questions. If you have any other questions, feel free to just drop them in the chat and I'll make sure that we address them today. Firstly, some of the questions that came in from Shreyas Sen, Solomon Alton, and G Sladden.
I think the crux of these questions were the share price being challenged, and what are we doing about that and why is that happening? I think share price has been challenged, and frankly, as a business leader, has been frustrating, I would say. I think, I've been given the wisdom time and time and time again, which is keep your head down and focus on just delivering for the business, and in the long run, the share price will take care of itself. I think ultimately delivering a massive re-acceleration in Australian GMV growth, is a testament to that focus of our team and of the U.S., the U.K. charging, as well as new product launches like memberships and recurring tasks. These are all things that we can be in control of.
With respect to the macro, I think we are suffering from the SaaSpocalypse, which is bundling in with software. I think we are being impacted by the AI uncertainty, which the slides today are designed to address some of those concerns and give people the ground-up knowledge around AI. Finally, I think we are being hit by a small cap ASX challenge, which I think has affected a lot of small caps with some externalities ranging from certain funds being liquidated and having to clear positions and things like that. I wish I had a better answer on what are we doing about the share price. If we could solve that, everything would be ultimately solved.
I guess what I would say is I'm open to collaboration, anyone's specific ideas on what we can do to try and improve the share price on the back of what I think are really, really strong business results. The second was a great question about Formula One and what it's doing for us and how it's adding value to us. It's been an incredible journey with Racing Bulls. As a reminder, our partnership is that we sponsor the team behind the dream, the people doing all of the tasks in the great world of Formula One. Overarchingly, the audience for Formula One has just gone up through the absolute roof. I mean, everyone is just talking about Formula One.
There is a bit of a hiatus in this last four weeks due to the cancellation of two Middle Eastern races, which have been a bit of a gap, but the audience for this is absolutely enormous. We get quarterly reporting from the Racing Bulls team on brand exposure and all that. That's proven a significant ROI, 2x or 3x what we invested into the partnership. I think even more importantly is, if you check us out on Instagram and Twitter, some of the collaborations that we do with all of these different properties that we've invested in are delivering some real results there. Massively improved engagement across the board on our social handles and the brand cachet that we're building.
Formula One has been a great investment for us, and I think actually one of the most economical and high ROI brand investments that we've made. Okay. I'm going to now switch from, again, thanks Solomon, G. Sladden, and Shreyas for your questions. Please keep them coming. Now switch to some of the questions that have been asked in the chat. From Michael Trott, strong result, great to see. Want to understand why there's no small uplift in FY 2026 guidance on the back of this. We've typically kept FY 2020 our guidance to be fairly. We don't want to make promises that we can't keep, and I would say that we really want to make sure that we follow through.
Double-digit revenue in the context of not making any changes to yield means that we had to deliver on our top line GMV, and I think we have done that. But I think, we're reticent to upgrade that result from what's in February. We would rather be more on the cautious side and make sure that we underpromise and overdeliver. In FY 2025 was Oneflare profitable? From Daniel Sims, what level of profits could you squeeze out with this renewed focus? Oneflare is not a separate business entity. It's an asset that's owned by the Airtasker Group. On a direct cost basis, it was roughly cash flow neutral, meaning staff, marketing, and software that was explicitly allocated to the Oneflare business versus Oneflare's revenues were roughly equal. On a direct basis, cash neutral.
That said, if you were to peel back all of the indirect costs, some of those being more abstract and some being quite connectable indirect costs. For example, some of the software infrastructure layer that we have or the fact that some of our software is on a per seat basis, and that includes a bunch of staff. A lot of these things were not being factored in. On that basis, Oneflare was costing us money. With these changes that we've made to change the cost base of that business, we've been able to bring it back to in-month profitability. We are assessing what we're going to do with that next. I would say that its current position is its roughly direct cash neutral. If we eliminated some of those indirect costs, it would actually probably generate cash for us.
We haven't made any firm decision on that, but we are going to make a decision on our next steps for Oneflare in this coming quarter. I think one good call-out in terms of future profits of this model is that what it demonstrates to us is that the lead generation model, which is sort of the hipages and Oneflare model, it is challenging to scale this model because the margin profile is very different to Airtasker. It's driven by salespeople, and it's largely dependent on Google search marketing. Both of those things mean that you don't quite get the same operating leverage as Airtasker. I think it is good to have had the inside run on the benefits of the transactional marketplace model versus the lead generation model.
From Brent, is the monetization rate in the international marketplace the same as Australia, roughly 20%-22%? Yes, we are currently running on pretty similar monetization rates. It's slightly higher in Australia because lowering cancellation rates increased the monetization rate. As a reminder, the way that we calculate the monetization rate is the revenue divided by the GMV. The revenue is much higher on a completed task versus a canceled task, meaning that as you decrease your cancellation rate, you increase your reliability, you generally increase your monetization rate. Again, this is really great to align incentives towards, we do better if more people are getting their tasks done. That's really, really great. It does mean there's probably a 1% difference between the U.S. and U.K. versus Australia because we have higher reliability rates in the Australian market.
GMV growth fueled by advertising contra makes it easily cash positive, but what do the results look like on an EBITDA basis? That's a fair call out. We are doing about AUD 5 million run rate of advertising media contra in the Australian marketplace per year. We've tried to be really transparent about that. We did two deals in 2024, with ARN Media and with oOh!media, AUD 5 million each, and we're roughly utilizing them over two years, so it's AUD 5 million per year. If you wanted to get an adjusted EBITDA or cash basis for the Australian business, I would knock AUD 5 million of cash off the bottom. If you look at that in FY 2025, we produced about AUD 15.2 million from the Australian business.
On an adjusted basis, if we had paid for all of our marketing directly with cash in that year, you could knock off AUD 5 million off that. That'll be AUD 10 million or AUD 11 million positive cash flow coming out of Australia. We think that this is absolutely still the right use of our balance sheet, that every year we bring the media forward and we pay for it three years later or two years later in this case, because at 4.9% interest, which is what we just signed up with Channel Nine, it's an incredibly good use of balance sheet. From Steve S, jump from 6.4% GMV to 17.8% is a material inflection. Can you talk to the cadence within the quarter as April tracking and what's happening with the different media partners? A couple of things.
First thing I would say is that the quarter was, we saw a really, really strong run into Christmas, not at 17.8%, but at picking up a pace into the Christmas season. As we came back in January, February, we're just tracking at a higher volume, and that's been consistently at this high growth rate over the prior year. As mentioned, of the 17.8%, about 9% of it is volume growth, predominantly being driven by higher throughput rate of tasks getting completed. Partially from an increase in posted tasks, but also a great material improvement in the assignment rate, which is great to see. Then about 7%-8% driven by the average task price, just the value of tasks going up. One thing to call out is when you put a 1% pricing change on a 20-ish% monetization rate, that just tacks on another 5%.
Increasing your revenue from 20% - 21% or from 22 %- 23% or 23 %- 25%, it's like a 4%-5% year-on-year revenue increase, and what we're excited by is that this is a leading indicator. If you can increase your GMV, you can go back and monetize that later and drive revenue growth out of that. That has a material impact on cash, when you're looking at sort of like a AUD 200 million GMV run rate. Well, a AUD 220 million GMV run rate now. Yeah, really important to say that the revenue lags the GMV, and that's intentional. In terms of how we think it's going into the fourth quarter of the year, we've got great momentum. I would say that the third quarter is sort of reflective of what would be a good outcome in the fourth quarter as well.
No major update that we want to provide there. That said, we are seeing some really, really interesting leading indicators from our membership program. In the first four weeks, we acquired 1,000 users. That's now four weeks ago. We are seeing some new numbers are coming through, which look very, very promising. I think when you look at the structure of our membership model, the structure of the model is that it self-incentivizes customers to use the product more frequently. Because once a customer buys a membership, it's about AUD 89, you are generally getting value from that membership when you use Airtasker 3 x or more in a year.
We have a significant percentage of our customers now saying, "Yeah, I want to commit to using Airtasker 3x a year." The financial mechanism is really, you get the cash up front, and then if you use Airtasker 3x, 4x, 5x more per year, you miss out on the customer-side revenue, but you're monetizing that for 2/3 of its incremental revenue for every task that happens there. I would say that for the most part, with some extreme edge case exceptions excluded, when someone signs up for a membership, it's absolutely good news. It's bringing forward cash and it's essentially committing to frequency, and its recurring revenue that just auto-renews every year, which is great. From Charlie S: In these changing times, how do you think about staying agile?
How significant do you expect token cost to become as part of your overall cost structure? Really, really great question. We are investing into AI, but I would say that I take a pretty moderated or balanced view on investing into artificial intelligence. I know that there are headlines in the last week or so that Uber's burned through their token spend in the first quarter that they thought they would use for the first year. I do think there are wasteful incentives that are in play around AI. Like, for example, a lot of boards are instructing CEOs, "Oh yeah, just go and invest $10 million into AI," and then he'll just go burn through it. We're taking much more of an intentional bottoms-up process for that. We are rolling out [Claude Cowork] across the company.
Claude Code is already giving us about a 3x velocity increase on software development. We think that, for us as a relatively small team of 200 people, is about 75 per year. Let me just see if I've lost the window. Apologies there. Had a little bit of a technical glitch. I've just missed the last question. I think the question was about artificial intelligence, and in relation to artificial intelligence, we expect to see a low double-digit number or high single-digit number on AI in FY 2027, and we don't expect to be a material output. Steve, you have. Oh, sorry. Hi there. Is that a little bit clearer now? If you could just get a thumbs up in the chat, that would be amazing. Okay, awesome. Steve S, I think there were some questions from you.
If you could just repeat those in the chat, apologies. I'll go to the questions that have reappeared in my chat. From Michael Trott, are there any updates on exploring other AI partnerships further, i.e., agentic storefronts that increase engagement? Yes. We have an excellent search and discovery team who are exploring going well beyond a traditional Google search into a lot of social search and then AI search. If you go in and look at some of our web traffic and chat traffic and engagement metrics versus Checkatrade, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, we're really, really far ahead. The reason for that is that underlyingly, Airtasker's engagement model has a lot more content than those marketplaces. Because we are an embedded transaction model, people are posting the tasks, they're talking about the tasks, they're getting ratings, they're getting reviews. All this content lives on our platform.
Ultimately, I think that the distribution is going to be massively favoring the people that are carrying that proprietary data. Yeah, really, really excited to see that play out and to be leveraging one of our core advantages. We are building a ChatGPT app, and building an OpenAI app, embedded app, which a lot of companies are doing this now. I actually tried the Checkatrade one in the U.K., and I asked it, "Hey, I've got a roof leak. Who should I use to fix my roof leak?" The Checkatrade app told me to use Airtasker. I think I wouldn't necessarily say that that distribution is reliable, and I would come back more to the fundamentals.
If you've got the right product fit and you've got proprietary data, which I think Airtasker has the advantage in, then I think you're going to see benefits from that. From Steve S, talking of brand awareness in the U.K., how's it tracking? Are you seeing uptick coming into peak season? Yep. I think we are due to get a new YouGov brand update shortly, as well as a Mutinex MMM model update shortly. What I'm seeing in my dashboards, I'm short of those quarterly reports, is that the data's all heading in the right direction. One of the things I think is interesting, and we're postulating, sharing this in some of our investor decks, but if you look at some of the web metrics, I think those are great real-time indicators of how the market share is moving around.
We're doing a really, really good job there on both a traffic acquisition, but also a user engagement level. I'd encourage you to look into Google Trends, App Annie, these kinds of platforms to talk about it, and we will start sharing some of that data ahead of them too. What's the strategy on LLM integration? Any MCP connectivity? I think one of the things that is really important is setting up your platform to be discoverable by the changing nature of the search landscape. If I'd structure one level back, I think that Airtasker has a really powerful proposition because it's rooted in the physical real world, at the core level. Then we have network effects, proprietary data, and transaction embedded, meaning that we don't get replaced as a platform.
I do think the nature of search and discovery is going to change a lot. People, instead of going to Google, they're going to go to different ways of finding out what to do next. Now, I think that's going to proliferate. Meaning more people are going to be able to find more things to go and do. Constraint's going to be the physical world. I think this is all going to be good for us. It's going to grow our marketplace. It does mean that you need to think about how you engage with all of these different search methods. One layer of that is embedded apps. We are building an embedded app in OpenAI. I'm not sure whether that is the right methodology. We've also built our own AI-based interface.
If you go to airtasker.com/post-task-AI, you can actually try out our version of an AI model, and we've got two. One is a sort of tap, tap, called the building blocks AI model. We've also got conversational AI models. Both of those are interesting, but what we found is most users do not want to engage with AI to get their plumbing done just yet. They want to engage with Airtasker. It's actually simpler. Just post a task rather than talking to a chatbot. You've got the agentic protocol layer, where you want to make sure that people can buy, agents can purchase on Airtasker, and we are looking to make a lot of our code available and complementary to agentic commerce.
I think more practical in the short term is primarily making it so that the search and discovery bots can easily find their way around Airtasker and get to all the data, but that data is still living on Airtasker, so you've got to come to us to ultimately get it. In doing that, some examples of that is we're moving everything to server-side UI rendering, for example. You don't want to have native UI rendering because bots don't actually render UI. You want all of the pages essentially to be getting formulated on the server side, so when the robots come, they can go, "Cool, I can see how this whole page works.
I can read it, and I can bring that information back through Gemini or OpenAI to the user." That's an example of where it's not a direct AI integration, but we are basically setting it up so that the AI can access our platform and serve us traffic. Plans for AI to be embedded in the product, not as just a distribution channel? Absolutely. We have a team working on a bunch of features. Some obvious stuff are predictive text, budget suggestions, and things like that. Our conclusion, after putting a lot of effort into building an AI interface, a custom AI interface, was that people don't want to post a task through AI. That's not what they're thinking.
They're thinking, "How do I come to Airtasker, and how does AI make it easier for me to get a task done?" It's more that Airtasker can take components of AI and make the Airtasker experience better. I will continue. That was from Charlie Song. Steve, we talked already about brand awareness in the U.S., U.K. From John B, "Why did you go with Nine in the latest media deal? Have ARN and RML delivered?" We have done partnerships with an outdoor company, oOh!media, and an audio company, ARN, and Channel Nine obviously brings us the third kind of broadcast media, which is TV and streaming. They do actually also own QMS Media now, which is another outdoor brand, which is an interesting place to be in. Overall, we've had a great experience working with ARN and oOh!media. Awesome. We've uplifted our brand.
We wanted to add television into that, and moving into FY 2027, we're in great discussions about extending partnerships with all of our media partners, and really emphasizing the ones that have delivered outsized results for us. Using the marketing mix modeling that we're doing alongside Mutinex, we're really able to see what's working versus what's not working. Really, really exciting. U.K. close to profitability, looking in new markets. I think one of the things I wanted to call out here is the benchmark that we set out, which is over three years, we can get to a AUD 25 million GMV run rate, generating AUD 5 million of gross margin, and that's enough to keep that marketplace going and easily be profitable. We're going to fly through that target, I think, in the fourth quarter.
We're at AUD 23 million in March, and we usually see a good run into the year. I think that really what we have is a choice of do we continue to invest in that marketplace and double down on that growth or do we bring it back to cash neutral or do we actually start taking dividends out of it to invest into the next market? I'd say with a very cash flow generation mindset, I think the best decision now is to start bringing Airtasker U.K. back towards a profitability. We are expecting the net burn to be significantly less in FY 2027 versus FY 2026 for the U.K., but we will likely still be net cash investors into the U.K. market.
I wouldn't think of it yet as a cash generator, but I would think of it as less of a cash investment, meaning that we can dial up investment elsewhere. Predominantly, that focus right now is in key cities in the United States, which is going well. We're getting so much inbound interest from media players all across the world that there really is an opportunity to take that effective franchise model and move it into new countries, leveraging our software platform, which we're building and investing into anyway. From Charlie S., "Would you agree that the barrier to entry is foregone for developing marketplaces? How do you think about growing, retaining market share outside of your network effects and proprietary data?" It's really interesting to think about whether the barriers to entry have increased or decreased for marketplaces.
Some examples of where the barriers have actually increased would be, for example, regulatory lock-in. In Australia, even if you do even one transaction online, you need to provide tax information to the government. That system costs about AUD 1.5 million-AUD 2 million a year to run that system. It also adds a lot of friction to acquiring taskers on the platform. They've got to put in all of this verifiable, essentially similar to KYC, AML type information, and we have 100,000 of these users who have done that. Replicating that on another marketplace is really, really difficult, especially when you're starting from one to three transactions a year. We know this because we had to start from one to three transactions a year. I don't think the moat of network effects and regulatory lock-in has gotten any easier.
In fact, I think it's probably gotten a lot harder because the cost of marketing has gotten higher. The cost of capital has most likely gotten harder for marketplaces as well because in 2010 to 2020, the general valuation multiple was something like 20x forward revenue for a marketplace. Now we're probably looking at, in a good world, that number is probably less than 20x next year's revenues. I would say the cost of capital is higher, the cost of marketing is higher, and the ability to do that regulatory stuff is harder. How are you planning to pay back media commitments in the near future? We have cash on balance sheet to pay back media commitments if we so choose to settle them in cash. As a reminder, it's really our choice to settle them in cash or settle them in equity.
We have sufficient cash to settle them all with cash. With respect to future media commitments in the Australian market, we're very much taking the view that we do not want to be dependent on any kind of external funding. Essentially what that means is that we are storing cash on our balance sheet ready to pay down Australian media notes. With respect to U.S. and U.K. media notes, we provided some analysis in the last presentation, which spoke to how those media deals get sorted out. If you look through them, it's very, very high probability that we're going to settle them into equity into the local subsidiaries. Then, depending on what the outcome is, settle those again with equity and ART. Again, as a reminder, all of those choices sit with Airtasker as to repaying cash or repaying equity.
We have a lot of flexibility to do that. Any plans to spin off Oneflare? I don't have any specific update on that today, but we are watching this business. We've made some significant changes to its cost base, and we're reviewing again this quarter, and we'll have a good update in June. From Ben A, "Are you looking to expand into any other international markets?" We are getting a lot of inbound interest from media companies all around the world going, "Wow, this model works." The model of turning media traffic into transactional models is really, really exciting. We've got a lot of options there. The constraining factor, I would say, is the share price, because to go into new markets, it is a net investment, including cash up front. The two choices are that we continue to just buckle down what we're doing now.
Continue to expand the profitability and cash generation in Australia, and in the U.K. shortly as well, and then use that cash to expand. Of course, if there was a change in the cost of capital, we can put our foot down massively. We think that's a really exciting reason to be a listed company, is that we have a couple of good quarters, we can really build up that momentum, and if that cost of capital changes, we can turbocharge our investments into new markets as well. As a reminder, we're using the same piece of software going into new markets. We're just replicating the marketing. The economics are very exciting. Chase Flatton, "Are the growing media deals having an impact on the ART share price?" Yeah, I think it's been quite positive.
I think the media deals, as people have sort of realized that the cost of capital is 4.9% on the media deals, I think by institutional investors being perceived very, very well. We're going to continue to deliver results of them. That is obviously important, but it's also a consistent part of our strategy moving forward. From Hayden Ness, "With the cost of building and testing software falling dramatically, as you mentioned, I'm curious about what's on the product roadmap for projects and initiatives that perhaps weren't economically viable to test and roll out 12-18 months ago." Oh, man. This is what gets me excited. Things that literally felt like they were three-five years away are now three-five months away.
I think membership is a really, really exciting product vector, which we are charging down, and there's so many iterations and variations on this. I think recurring tasks and rebooking was always something that was pretty heavy lift on the software side, and the pace of iteration on rebooking has been incredible. Gift cards, I think Airtasker as a gift, is also a very, very interesting product vector, which I think you're going to see a lot of rapid iteration on. In the big picture, I think the financial ecosystem that Airtasker is building, it's a sort of AUD 200 million closing on AUD 250 million GMV marketplace now, and a lot of that money just is sort of transient and sort of moves through Airtasker. Building out an ecosystem which retains some of that financial value moving around is very, very exciting to me. Watch this space.
I think you're going to see a lot of movement in that space, and we'll endeavor to share more on the product update side. Lastly, other AI partnerships. I know we talked about AI a little bit, but yeah, at every layer we are considering AI. Also being quite balanced, because I think there are a lot of companies just investing for the sake of investing, and that's great for Anthropic. I think it's kind of genius the way that Anthropic's kind of told you, "If you don't spend money with us, your business is over, so spend all your money with us." Packaged up in a very marketable and positive way. I think it's also important as the investor of that money to be really responsible and intentional about how we spend it. We're going to continue to do that.
Thanks so much, and glad that we actually got to go through all of the questions today. Apologies for the technical glitch earlier, and hope everyone has a great day, and we can see some positive moves on the share price. If we do, I think we can have some great compounding impact into the future. Thanks so much, everyone.