Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'd like to start by saying I'm very proud that Blackp earl has consistently delivered on the things that we say we're going to do. If you care to review our listing document that we put out in December 2022, we said our intentions were to drive product-led growth at application level, so this was by investing in new features and user experience and data-driven R&D. Literally cut and paste. That's what we said. We said we were going to build on and leverage our technology asset, the Pearl Engine, and we were going to access new data, and we're going to use the centralized platform to support rapid building and product iterations. That's what we said we were going to do. In March 2023, we did exactly that.
We secured new data assets, and we built and released Pearl Diver, a product which we said would create dynamic new revenue channels and go-to-market opportunities for Blackp earl Group. You'll see in the presentation today, this product has now brought us almost NZD 10 million in annual recurring revenue. Fast forward to our FY 2023 report, I was quoted in saying that the world would experience electric growth driven by AI and machine learning, and the gap between the haves and have-nots would become ever increasing. In fact, if you want to dive back into the archives even before listing, you'll note that we predicted the seismic trend years earlier. We're at a generational moment now. It's a moment in time where AI adoption is accelerating, and Blackp earl Group is positioned to lead in this area because we've anticipated this trend and invested ahead of the curve.
In October last year, when we raised capital, we said to the market that the use of this capital would be for the evolution of Pearl Diver in order to get higher-value customers and to build new features and applications. You will see today that since then, we have increased Pearl Diver average revenue per user by 50%. We have delivered to the market true, true, underscore that, agentic AI in the form of Bebop. Blackp earl Group is defined by its relentless drive to win and to follow through on our word. There is something else we have said publicly many times, and that is our ambition just is not to get to NZD 20 million. It is to get to NZD 50 million annual recurring revenue in the next 2.5- 4.5 years. We are unapologetically chasing something massive, and that is to win in the U.S. market.
As you review our financials and reflect on the very significant successes that we've delivered over the last year, I want you to keep in mind that we're not just focused about today's performance, or in this case, yesterday's performance. We're building for scale. We're building for midterm and long-term successes. We're not here to polish the rowboat. We're building ships to cross an ocean. With that, I'd love to dive into our numbers from our financial year 2025. There is lots to be very proud of and to celebrate here. One thing you'll continually hear me talk about today is our increase in average revenue per user, and I'm going to contextualize that later in this presentation on why that is such a key thing to focus on in the modern world.
We've increased subscription revenue disproportionate to that of ARR, which shows that we're getting more efficient in how we're doing business. You know, one of the, I guess, the perpetual standouts, I think, with any of our financial reporting is the efficiency we're doing this at with the people. Nearly a NZD 250,000 annual recurring revenue per person for a rapid growth company at our size is an exceptional number. Now, ironically, the one number that you might look at here and think isn't quite good, which is the gross profit, in fact, that is one of the best decisions we've made. This is a temporary dip because we've transitioned to a fixed supply model and fixed costs, which will mean that as we move forward, things will become more and more profitable. This was a decision for today to help our growth tomorrow.
Karen will be talking more about the mathematical certainty of that gross margin improving when she talks through the numbers. It is not just the growth numbers, but there have also been some significant increases to our balance sheet with the fact that we successfully raised NZD 12.5 million last year. We got access to non-dilutive growth funding from the Bank of New Zealand, which provides us amazing opportunity to further accelerate growth. One of the things which the geek in me is particularly proud of is the massive increase that we have achieved in our data asset of 210%. I think I am going to steal Sam's thunder later by saying that we have literally increased the rows of data we ingest daily from 6 billion to 21 billion in a very short time frame.
Why that is important is because this is the fuel that we use to create products which help our customers find more customers affordably. The better fuel and the more fuel you got, the faster and better you're going to be able to power your engine. These are all things that we can feel really proud about that aren't just good for the last results, but the future. That's always where we've got our eyes. Let's talk about the future. Again, when we raised capital in October last year, we said we were going to use that capital for three things. One, we were going to use this to evolve Pearl Diver to hunt a higher class of customers that ultimately take less cost of service per customer apportionate to their value, so more effective cost of service.
People that stay longer get better utilization out of the data. For that, we invested in the product and we invested in people, and we have delivered on that. We have evolved our product. We have hunted higher value customers, and that is evident with the increase in average revenue per user that we've achieved. The second thing we said we were going to do is create new products. I tell you what, that was an understatement. Bebop is genuine AI. Now, in a world where I'm almost loath to use that word because anyone with some sort of automation or thinly designed skin on an application calls it AI, and it's not. This is AI. This is an augmented large language model delivering amazing value to customers. I want to show you how that's immediately started to affect our revenue trajectory in amazing ways.
The last thing we said we were going to do is look for bolt-on acquisitions, and why that's obviously not something we're going to be talking about greatly. We're evaluating two very exciting bolt-on acquisitions. Again, we do what we say we're going to do, invest for today and invest for the future. Let's look at Pearl Diver and how that has succeeded over the last 12 months. Now, I want you to bear in mind that Pearl Diver was very literally built in 45 days. From an idea on a whiteboard to in customers' hands, paying customers' hands took 45 days. If you've got amazing eyes and, you know, despite laser surgery, mine really can't focus in on this one.
You'll note in Q4 of FY 2023, there is a tiny little pink line, and that was Pearl Diver's first contribution to Blackp earl Group's revenue. Look how it's scaled. We're now delivering nearly NZD 10 million worth of annual recurring revenue from that product. Keen observers will see that last quarter, there is a new color at the top. That is the color of Bebop. It is orange. This is a product that has delivered even more annual recurring revenue out of the gate than Pearl Diver did and has even higher customer interest and has more paths to market. Really what we're doing here is firing up dual high growth channels and something that we are looking to replicate or maybe even outdo the success of Pearl Diver. I talk a lot about average revenue per user.
If you're a SaaS nerd, and again, tech nerd and SaaS nerd, I'm many types of nerd, there are five key things that you want to look at if you're building a very effective recurring revenue model. The average revenue per customer or per user, how many months you retain that person for, the cost of acquisition, or more importantly, how many months or how long it takes you to repay that cost, your cost of servicing that customer over the time they're on your service. There's a fifth one, which in most SaaS companies is a dirty little secret, and one we're very open about factoring into our equations, that's R&D. Now, all of these are important, and they all have quite a dramatic effect on each other. If you change one, it will affect the other ones and not necessarily in a positive way.
Different combinations of these key metrics yield different types of SaaS models. We are focused on an efficient SaaS model for modern times. We believe that ARPU is the best area of focus because it helps reduce your cost of acquisition payback time. If you get the right kind of customers, it actually decreases cost of service, and you are actually front-loading capital or front-loading revenue that you are bringing in from customers. This is why we are so proud with the fact that Pearl Diver's annual revenue per user is actually increased by design by 132% year- on- year. What a heck of an achievement. Very proud of the team for that. Let's talk about Bebop. In March, we launched Bebop. Again, a true AI agent designed for sales teams and entrepreneurs.
The importance of this is it attacks our primary market, which is the U.S.A., our primary small to medium-sized businesses in the U.S.A. from a different vector and provides a new growth channel for us. It is a phenomenal product that quite literally can give you three hours' worth of detailed customer research in 30 seconds. For businesses, what that does helps you increase revenue by better personalization with pitches, and it helps you increase revenue because you're able to sell more with less because you're collapsing time, especially when 80% of salespeople spend their time on non-selling activities currently. Very exciting product. You know, I keep saying I started my first company in 2024, I've brought many products to the market, and I have never seen a product with such just phenomenal feedback from customers. You literally watch people's faces change as you present it to them.
We are really excited by the potential of this product and the many go-to-market angles that this opens up. Let's think about the continued investment, right? Because again, we do not go and take in capital for no reason. We take in capital because we want to invest strategically for growth in the future. We have invested where this counts in people, in our platform, and in our product. These are already yielding results. The best part of our investment is that most of those results will be more evident in the mid to long term because we are putting in the foundations to continually support our growth, not just to NZD 20 million, but to NZD 50 million ARR and beyond. We remain well-funded, really well-supported, great cash on hand. We have got an undrawn, non-dilutive banking facility.
We have options to keep driving growth and keep fulfilling our promise to the market of hitting that NZD 50 million ARR. With that, I'd like to hand you over to our Interim Chief Financial Officer, Karen Cargill, to talk through the numbers in more depth.
Thanks, Nick. I'm going to run through, like Nick said, a little more commentary on the FY 2025 results. We're going to start with subscription revenue. Our subscription revenue grew 91% year- on- year throughout FY 2025, and we finished at NZD 7.7 million. There's a natural lag between what you see as ARR and what you see as subscription revenue recognized in the financial statements. We expect this to close as our new customers ramp up. This consistent upward trend in both ARR and subscription revenue signals strong underlying momentum in the business.
Like Nick's graph earlier, what you can see at the end of that graph in yellow this time is the contribution of Bebop towards the end of the year. This is showing good trajectory as we head into FY 2026. We saw the same trend towards the end of FY 2023 when we'd released Pearl Diver. Now we would take a look at Churn, which obviously peaked in Q3, but this was when we made a deliberate decision to phase out the customers that did not meet our ideal customer profile. These non-ICP customers were low-tier, high-cost customers who were putting a strain on our operations due to the manual onboarding. Transitioning away from them has improved our Churn, which had stabilized at 5.3% at the end of the year. By focusing on the higher value accounts, we've seen their ARPU increase, as Nick talked about earlier.
The shift to high, sorry, the shift to ICP-aligned customers has also improved our customer retention and our customer lifetime value. Our gross margin for the year came in at 68%, which was slightly down from 71% last year. Again, this is an example of something going down in order to come back up efficiently, and the dip was expected. We moved to our new fixed fee data agreement, and the temporary dip reflects the period of crossover between the data contracts. We expect to see the recovery in Q2 FY 2026 as this old contract phases out. This is a fixed flat fee agreement. As revenue increases, our gross margin should also increase. We'll take a look at expenses now. This graph is showing our personnel, operating, and admin expenses as a percentage of our revenue, with the pink bars showing efficiencies made.
Our costs have increased from FY 2024, but overall, they are growing efficiently in line with revenue. We're very pleased with the biggest area of efficiency, which has been our spend on admin expenses. This is good because this is expenditure that is not directly related to revenue generation. We've increased our investment in product, AI, and go-to-market, all in alignment with the roadmap we set out during the cap raise. Overall, our expenses rose as planned to support future scale. Our ARR per employee, as Nick has already mentioned, reached NZD 245,000 per person. This is a 7% increase year- on- year. This had peaked in Q2, and then we obviously increased our headcount as we said we were doing the cap raise. We've built the team out rapidly in order to compress time to scale.
Our headcount rose from 41 to 51 in the latter half of the year. This metric will obviously improve as our revenue increases. Finally, we take a look at our balance sheet. FY 2025 included deliberate investment across the business. Our cash burn reflects the cycle that we are in. We are well capitalized heading into FY 2026 with NZD 6.7 million in cash and access to the NZD 4 million non-dilutive facility. Our balance sheet remains strong. We have the capital and the platform in place to keep building. Pearl Diver has proven scale, and Bebop is now positioned to contribute. With that, I'm going to pass you over to Sam, our CTO.
Hey, everyone. It's great to talk to you with you this morning.
I'm going to talk through how we're executing on our plan with our core technology and our products as we track towards NZD 50 million and beyond. I'm going to cover three areas. The first is how our product suite has evolved. The second is our platform for sustained innovation, and the third is the roadmap of those products. Let's get started with the suite of products. As Nick outlined, we have extended the functionality and audience of Pearl Diver into intent-based marketing and audience creation for social media channels. That expansion of data, volume, and functionality really gives us a ton of runway in that Pearl Diver product for the coming year. I'll cover a couple of those aspects in the roadmap. We also seized this moment, or as Nick calls it, this electric moment in time to create Bebop.
Bebop has the latest in generative AI, research agents, and data, and it provides unparalleled capability for B2B sales team. It is no exaggeration to say that this technology simply did not exist 12 months ago, which is why seizing this moment in time is so important. I just got a piece of feedback from one of our beta users this morning that I thought I would read out because it captures it perfectly. He is using the product that we are about to release next week into full. This is awesome, literally perfect for any sales rep. The potential objections piece is unlike anything I have seen before from other large language models. It is so good hearing that feedback. You do not get better than that.
I was talking with a CRO a few days ago, and he said it gives every one of my sales team an extra day a week. Literally providing hours of research in minutes. This collapsing of time is also key to the Pearl Engine and aligns perfectly. Let's take a look at that. The Pearl Engine is made up of reusable software components, design assets, data sets, and the underlying infrastructure. This year, we added our augmented LLM or Large Language Model as part of the Bebop development. The competitive outcome of this is collapsing the time from idea to delivering a product innovation into market. We could not have built Pearl Diver in 45 days without this underlying platform. In the same way, we are able to build the augmented LLM for Bebop in 90 days.
That is because we already have the data assets, the architecture, and the infrastructure to go super fast. Bebop, in particular, uses the latest up-to-date data models and pipeline as plug-and-play components. Our AI today is both cheaper and better than it was even three months ago because of this plug-and-play LLM infrastructure and this approach. It is only improving. We are only going to see cost improvements and effectiveness improvements. I just want to say that products might appear as overnight innovations, but really they are built from years of investment and years of expertise, and that is what gives us the competitive advantage. All right, what is coming up in the roadmap? For Pearl Diver, we will continue to roll out features to improve both the ease of use and increased ways of using that data.
We're also adding in increasingly sophisticated data sets and additional processing. Bebop is rapidly evolving from the Prospecting Beta that we launched with in March to our upcoming release, which is empowering teams and sales leaders. As I say, you should look for that coming out next week. Bebop also has this great opportunity around white labeling and moving into global data. For the many questions I've had, yes, that includes New Zealand and Australia. Along with those general enhancements, it's going to provide a lot of growth opportunity for us. Now then we have this third category, which is wholesale, which is a new revenue category for us.
The volume and reach of the Pearl Diver data set opens up data commercialization that sits alongside and outside of the current application that people access and gives us quite a different market to address around those big marketing agencies in particular. The depth and uniqueness of the Bebop data that we create also allows us to monetize that with organizations where the application isn't suitable for their use. We've got a few deals cooking on both those areas as we speak, but obviously, I don't want to count any chickens there before they hatch. The combined Pearl Diver growth, the Bebop as a new product, and the large wholesale deals, they give us great growth trajectory across those. I do want to finish by noting that at the last annual meeting, we never mentioned Bebop. That's because it hadn't been invented yet.
In addition to those three areas, there is this white space, this open space of innovation that is yet to come. Maybe something bigger than Pearl Diver, maybe more innovative than Bebop. Who knows? Thank you for your time. Back to you, Nick.
Yeah, I have to mute myself. I'll talk all the way through. Sam, you meant to count those chickens on this call. You should have just laid all that out for the future. Right, let's talk about our strategic approach. Jeff Bezos has called AI the new electricity. For those of you who haven't considered it or don't care, the electricity was put in place for one purpose: for lights. That was it. All that infrastructure. Now, I want you to think about the millions and millions of businesses and millions and millions of products that have come to the world because of electricity.
Literally everything you're interfacing with right now. That is how he considers AI. I agree. I also think AI is lava. Everyone knows it's going to erupt and absolutely change a business landscape or decimate a buying segment. You just do not know where or when. In the world of uncertainty, and that is literally what this time period is known as, like the age of uncertainty, can you rely on a single product and selling to a single type of decision maker in a single industry or a single vertical? The answer is absolutely not. You are waiting to get Pompeid if that is the case. Blackp earl is very strategic in the way that we go around creating our go-to-market and our product stack.
We focus on one market, which if you're going to focus on one, I'd argue the small to medium-sized market in America is the biggest and best. We focus on solving one problem, helping our customers find new customers. We do all this from one platform, as Sam said, because that means you're not managing a whole lot of different code bases or databases or data sets, and you can build very, very quickly and manage costs very effectively. We attack that market from different vectors. If you consider our foundational email products, they're for IT managers and marketing managers. Pearl Diver is for marketeers, marketing managers. Bebop, as Sam said, for sales leaders, sales reps, and entrepreneurs. This gives us resilience. It means that we're attacking that one singular market from all different trajectories.
That is really key to our success in the mid and long term. Let me finish off by talking about the market we are right in and the opportunity that we see today. We are in the biggest and best market in the world, in my opinion. Right now, there are over 30 million small businesses in the United States and they are fighting uphill tooth and nail. In a high-cost economy with tighter credits and shrinking margins, the old playbooks of revenue growth, burning cash on Google or Meta or sinking it into overpriced sales automation tools, they are not just outdated. They are actually lethal. Consider that lethal. At the same time, AI is rewriting the rules of customer acquisition. The early adopters will grow, and the rest, they will fall behind.
Blackp earl exists to arm these businesses with true AI-powered tools that create revenue without the drag of traditional sales and marketing spend. I do not consider us as a company selling software. I consider us as a company that is giving SMEs their future back. With that, I would like to hand it over to questions. I see there have been a few that have come in already. Tori, are you going to read the questions out, and we will see who is best placed to address them?
Hi, everyone. We have got the first question here for Nick. What is your view on the competitive landscape? Who are the key competitors, and how do their propositions compare? What is your view on the potential big tech entering the game?
Great question. Hopefully, those last two slides helped address a lot of that. The floor is lava.
The floor is lava, and everything is changing at such an amazing pace. We're in the fastest-changing industry in a period of time in human history. Your only true competitive advantage is speed. The way that we engineered Blackp earl from a technological point of view, and also if you kind of get it from our vibe, is about going the fastest. We are designed to go fastest, to get out of harm's way if we see a problem or seize an opportunity like we did in Bebop in real time when it presents ourselves. That is your only competitive advantage in the modern economy. Simple as that. Access to capital? Absolutely. Right people, right places, right investment? Absolutely. There is no certainty in the future in the world for those that do not have the flexibility to move with times.
I could talk through specific examples, but for me, that is the underlying thing. Again, we do not focus on just like we do not have an eyeball competitor in Blackp earl Group because we have products that are all different and attacking the market from different angles. Sure, the products have competitors. Who moves fastest, who moves with most conviction, they always win. You would not want to bet against us in one of those kind of races.
True. This question is for Sam. It says, what are the key differences between Pearl Diver and Bebop? It did originally say both tech and target market, but Nick has covered target market, so maybe more on the side of tech?
Yeah. Yeah. As Nick covered, the target markets are different. One for the marketing team and one really focused on sales leaders and their teams.
There is some overlap in the core data that is used around picking up internet signals of behavior. Really, aside from some of those core data sets, where Bebop is using generative AI to collapse research down for a human-to-human connection, that is where Bebop focuses, and Pearl Diver is about surfacing up very powerful data for marketing teams to use in advertising, broad advertising. Yeah, really quite different data sets and different layers of AI coming into those products.
Awesome. Thanks, Sam. This one is for Nick. There has been some volatility in your executive team. Can you shed some light on this? The strategy to attain some consistency and your confidence in the current team?
Great question. Interestingly, from my perspective, I think we have huge consistency with the core expertise within Blackp earl Group.
A little tradition here is if you hit 10 years, you get a gold watch. Differences here. It is a gold Casio calculator watch. I think, come on, it is cool. Karen, who has been the person that took us public as CFO, is just an absolutely amazing operator. She moved into Chief Governance Office. She was back at interim CFO. I mean, there is someone that has been consistently delivering results for the company for over a decade. Sophie Whelan, our lead developer, again, over a decade. I think our senior—what is Anthony's title? Someone help me out here. Another.
Tech lead.
Tech lead, yeah. Six years yesterday. Chris Watson, who is our Chief Data Officer, 9.5 years. Go and look at the technology and infrastructure team. I think the average there is five or six years. We have very, very sticky.
Of course, there's always going to be some changes. Obviously, with John, he went for the health reasons and something that he's got our absolute support on. I mean, it's undeniable that health is anyone's number one priority and should always be prioritized. There's always going to be a couple of moving parts because of life. On the whole, we have a lot of retention. Part of that, one of the great things about us going public, is about to have a share scheme which helps attract the best talent in New Zealand, oh, and globally. That's a real competitive advantage for Blackp earl Group as well. That really does help with retention.
Cool. Thank you, Nick. This question is for Karen. Thanks for your presentation. How many of your team have equity in the business?
As Nick just said there, we've obviously used that share scheme to attract good quality employees. Almost, I would say, 80% of the company now has shares in the business. There's a bit of criteria to get into the scheme, but no, a lot of the business. Obviously, it helps with getting the right people and keeping them.
Thank you. Question here for Nick, and this is actually our final question. NZD 6.7 million cash and NZD 4 million loan facilities is a lot for a company of Blackp earl Group size. Is there a strategic plan for that money, or is it working capital?
No, we're very strategic and very deliberate. I have to be careful about forecasting too much. Yeah, we have really great cash on hand, and the BNZ has just been phenomenally supportive with us.
It gives us opportunities beyond perhaps what we've talked about today for growth. Again, I don't want to forecast too much, but the one thing you'll get about us is that we don't go slow. We don't go passively. When we see an opportunity, we seize it in real time and then make the most of it.
Cool. Thanks, Nick. There's a few questions in there that some of the information we haven't shared publicly yet, but we will follow up with each one of you via email. That brings our questions to a close.
I just want to thank everyone that took the time to jump on this call and to hear about our successes of last financial year and, I think, more importantly, our vision and aggression for achieving substantial results over the next financial year and beyond. Thank you very much.
As I always sign off, at Astero.