An Investor Relations Officer. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and a replay will be available on the company's IR website, where you can also access today's presentation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. For the Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you'll be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you do not want to open your microphone live, please write "No microphone" at the end of your question. In this case, our operator will read your question aloud. Now, I would like to welcome one of our speakers for today, Mr. Cassio Bobsin, Founder and CEO.
Sir, the floor is yours.
Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for this important announcement regarding our new strategic cycle. As you navigate an ever-evolving business landscape, strategic cycles play a critical role in shaping the direction and growth of companies. These cycles allow us to adapt to market changes, focus our resources, and position ourselves for long-term success. I'll start by quickly explaining how these strategic cycles have influenced our journey so far, the milestones we have achieved, and how this new cycle is designed to drive innovation, efficiency, and value creation for all stakeholders. Our mission since our inception 21 years ago has always been to revolutionize the experience customers have with companies and brands. We recognize that we had three distinct strategic cycles so far in this mission, and at this moment, we are closing the third one and launching the fourth one.
We had our first cycle, which was basically our startup phase, after being born in a garage as an SMS provider, then evolved to the second cycle, where we expanded our messaging capabilities and consolidated ourselves as the leading SMS broker in Brazil with a series of acquisitions. The third and latest strategic cycle began in 2018, when we decided to evolve from a leading Brazilian CPaaS to become the most comprehensive CX SaaS in Latin America, after a series of acquisitions held before and after our IPO of complementary companies, which over the last years have reinforced our strategy and vision for the future. We officially launched Zenvia Customer Cloud in 2024. Zenvia Customer Cloud is the culmination of this vision and is now our core business moving forward.
Now, as of January 2025, we have entered our fourth strategic cycle, centered on accelerating the growth of our newly defined core business. Let's dive in on Zenvia Customer Cloud on the next slide. We are truly excited about Zenvia Customer Cloud and the immense potential it brings to our company. This platform represents a pivotal milestone in our commitment to enhancing customer experiences. Zenvia Customer Cloud is powered by AI-driven solutions and robust data analytics, and is designed to adapt seamlessly to business of all sizes and across diverse industries. Clients already using it report enhanced customer engagement, increased sales, and reduced costs. It is important to highlight here that the launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud was leveraged by two important and strategic initiatives: the use of product-led growth strategies and our international expansion in Latin America.
Our product-led growth strategies empower users with flexible self-service access to our software, enabling them to start small, explore features at their own pace, and simply scale usage as their needs evolve. This approach, made possible through the integration of all services into a single unified platform, ensures an intuitive and adaptable experience for businesses of all sizes. By aligning perfectly with the needs of our clients, it drives higher adoption rates, fosters long-term customer relationships, and creates a highly scalable revenue opportunity, positioning Zenvia for sustainable growth in a highly dynamic market. Another key differentiator is our shift to a volume-based pricing model, where clients pay based on the number of interactions they have with their clients and prospects, rather than the traditional per-seat SaaS model.
This approach is enabled by the extensive use of AI in our software, which minimizes the reliance on human agents and enhances efficiency for our clients and unlocks greater revenue generation potential for us, which is much less complex, and our international expansion, particularly in Argentina and Mexico, where we already had a presence, is performing well and delivering results. These international clients are already delivering a solid contribution to the success of Zenvia Customer Cloud, further validating our strategy. The initial results we achieved in 2024, which I will share with you shortly, leave us energized and optimistic about the opportunities that lie ahead. This announcement today comes as the result of extensive analysis along with strategic planning and collaboration with our board.
As we work to develop this unified operating model, it became clear that this new cycle would require a much higher level of efficiency to ensure its success. Even though we have been streamlining our operations and bringing down our G&A as a percentage of revenues ratio throughout the last couple of years, concentrating our efforts on the company's core meant establishing new pillars to shape Zenvia that we aspire to become and need to be from now on in this new cycle. This resulted in the difficult decision to lay off 15% of our workforce, as we announced yesterday, to ensure we enter this new cycle on a solid and sustainable foundation.
As we enter this important new strategic cycle, we are laser-focused on driving organic growth by leveraging our unified platform and marketing opportunities, evolving and accelerating our partnership ecosystem, boosting profitability through smarter operations and efficiency, while reducing leverage to strengthen our foundation. At the same time, we're committed to building the optimal capital structure to support our ambitions and to ensure long-term resilience. These combined efforts position us to unlock meaningful, sustainable value and deliver solid returns to our shareholders as we move forward in our journey. I'll now hand the call over to Shay to present some of the numbers we already have from the platform.
Thank you, Cassio. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us at such short notice. This slide number four brings a snapshot of our new core business, Zenvia Customer Cloud. We are pleased with what we achieved in 2024, especially considering that we were in soft launch mode from March to October when we officially launched Zenvia Customer Cloud. We estimate that we closed 2024 with almost 6,000 companies already using the platform, out of which 20% outside Brazil, mainly from Latin countries, generating revenues close to BRL 200 million. This client base is a mix of existing clients who transitioned seamlessly to Zenvia Customer Cloud and new clients acquired throughout the year. In terms of growth, we estimate that this operation will expand by 25%-30% in 2025, achieving a gross margin between 68% and 70% and a positive EBITDA margin.
Our estimates are based on encouraging numbers from these first nine months of operations, which are aligned with solid data, showing that the addressable market is set to keep growing at a strong double-digit pace in the coming years. On top of that, our new unified operating model with advanced automation and AI puts us in a great position to make the most of these opportunities. Let's move to the next slide to talk about the next steps. We remain committed to streamlining our operations to enhance our efficiency. The headcount reduction announced is projected to generate cost savings of BRL 30 million-BRL 35 million in 2025, even after accounting for severance expenses. As a means to sharpen our focus on our core business and drive the expansion of our ecosystem, we'll carefully evaluate opportunities to divest non-core assets.
We believe we own assets that hold significant value in their segments, and an opportunistic divestment could play a key role in optimizing our capital structure. To wrap up, as we embark on a new strategic cycle, we're laser-focused on expanding Zenvia Customer Cloud in Brazil and Latin America. Our priorities are accelerating organic growth while continuing to leverage the company. We are confident that these actions will result in a more efficient company with exceptionally solid business metrics, enabling us to unlock significant value to our shareholders. Once again, we appreciate your continued trust as we move ahead. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks and are ready to take your questions
We will now begin the question and answer session. Once again, for this Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you'll be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. If you prefer not to open your microphone live, please write "No microphone" at the end of your question, and our operator will read your question aloud.
Hugo, while we wait for online questions, I'll get some on the written webcast here. Cassio, can you elaborate more on charging per interaction versus seat? Do you see any execution risk on this approach?
Yeah, sure. Everybody that is studying the SaaS industry as a whole understands that there's a movement going on of migrating from per-seat charging to another model, and basically, that happens because as companies leverage usage of AI, it reduces the amount of human users or agents that are required for each process. That's not, of course, a short-term trend, but a medium to long-term trend, and at Zenvia, as we are preparing, actually we're prepared for this future, we launched Zenvia Customer Cloud, already adopting a new business model that replaces the traditional model of per-seat charging for a per-interaction charging, and that means that companies, as they start using our software, they start using small from a single use case.
As they leverage most of their adoption using our AI tools, we're able to capture value from this new business model, even though they are not necessarily increasing the number of human agents. If they increase the number of AI agents, we're able not only to monetize that, but of course, bring innovation for these companies. That's working pretty well since we launched the first features, the first agents and AI-based features that is working in an amazing way. That's why we expect that being a leader in this transition for the industry will be a very good opportunity for us.
Thanks, Cassio. Another one here. In your press statement, you talk about the divestment of non-core assets. With your current switch to SaaS, would that include your CPaaS segment? If not, what would you consider non-core? So I'll take this one. Everything that is not related to the Zenvia Customer Cloud or not, we're not able to migrate to the Zenvia Customer Cloud is what we call non-core. And that includes the CPaaS. But I would highlight one important thing here is that we believe that even though we consider some assets to be non-core, we understand that they have value, they have solid metrics, and therefore, divesting from them means that it would have to generate value to shareholders, meaning the valuation is what we would believe to be and also help the leveraging balance sheet.
If this is not the case, we'll continue executing and operating even though we consider them non-core. Another question here. Curious what is the best way to think about the business moving forward? Are CPaaS and SaaS still going to be reported separately? How is Zenvia Customer Cloud cannibalizing revenues from that, and what might count as non-core assets under the new strategic direction? Cassio, I think it's, if you can just talk about the cannibalization of revenues, and I'll take the rest.
Sure. The numbers we mentioned on the Zenvia Customer Cloud doesn't account for any kind of overlap with CPaaS. These are pure numbers of Zenvia Customer Cloud customers. So we have no actually cannibalization in that sense. What we have and will always have are customers being encouraged to adopt more software. And that's why we focused on the ideal customer profile that they've been using SMS to start using Zenvia Customer Cloud. And we got interesting traction from these customers. Hence, when we are projecting our growth, we're looking for Zenvia Customer Cloud customers per se, but not any kind of new migration from customers coming from CPaaS. That's why we understand that all these operations are now healthy in their own ways.
On the reporting, we will continue reporting for the time being CPaaS and SaaS separately. The way we've been reporting, obviously, is that as we focus more in the near future on the Zenvia Customer Cloud, we expect at some point to start reporting that. I would say as of now, it's too early to give an exact timing on when we are going to start reporting separately for the Zenvia Customer Cloud. At this point, you should expect CPaaS and SaaS to continue being reported the way we've been doing for the next couple of quarters. Another question here. You mentioned in the previous quarter that early metrics for Zenvia Customer Cloud were very encouraging, and the engagement was five to ten times that of normal customers. Do you have any update on this?
I don't know, Cassio, if you want to share some early metrics on the Zenvia Customer Cloud?
Yeah, sure. I don't have any new numbers to disclose at this moment. We'll be glad to disclose more metrics over the course of time as we are going to put Zenvia Customer Cloud as our core. Of course, we're going to be able to share some more data. But in general terms, we've been keeping the same kind of engagement. That's why we're very, very optimistic on the growth of Zenvia Customer Cloud, especially as we combine a sales-driven approach with a product-led growth approach, which is performing pretty well, which means customers that start using the software, they by themselves, they experiment, they explore new features. They start using, they go into production, and then they are able to leverage more revenues as they upsell, they generate more interactions, they use more AI-based features, and so forth and so on.
So we've been the same kind of engagement going on with these new cohorts. And the customers that we've been migrating from former solutions are also now benefiting from these new capabilities, which encourage us to do this bold movement. We're very happy to do because we are seeing the very interesting foundations for the future we're building for Zenvia.
I'll keep going here. Do you have any timeline for asset monetization, and are there any plans to divest non-Customer Cloud SaaS solutions? So we don't have any timeline for asset monetization. At this point, we are sharing with you guys the plan. We don't have anything specific to be discussed or shared in terms of divestment right now. So it's too early to discuss these moves. And as I previously mentioned, everything that is not Zenvia Customer Cloud related is up for discussion. But again, I'll highlight that we see value on those assets, and it has to create and to generate value to shareholders when we are, if and when we are to discuss any divestment. Cassio, can you tell us what client segments will Zenvia focus on? As an example, SMB, enterprise, what's the focus of the company?
Sure. We've mainly focused with Zenvia Customer Cloud at B2C companies. And these companies are from a variety of industries. We've been serving customers from finance, retail, insurance, tech companies, services, education. So it's very diversified in terms of verticals. What is common between all these companies is they are serving lots of end customers.
You officially announced customer cloud service in October this year. Does it mean that your guidance provided today on cloud revenue would be for 2024 only? If so, are you expecting to increase this revenue by 2025 on a year basis? So let me just explain. So we soft launched the Zenvia Customer Cloud on March 24 and officially launched October 24. So when we say nine months, it's considering the soft launch from March. Basically, when we talk about our estimated revenues between BRL 180 million and BRL 200 million for Zenvia Customer Cloud, that includes revenues for the entire 2024 year, so since their launch on March.
And to comment on that, the numbers we're disclosing here for Zenvia Customer Cloud are a combination of newly acquired customers, cohorts that were acquired in 2024, plus customers that we migrated from former solutions, the standalone solutions from the companies we acquired. So this is a combination. We have a couple of thousand coming from each end. That's why we disclose the combination of these two that are now our Zenvia Customer Cloud customers.
Do you feel you have enough of a core in your Customer Cloud product at this point to grow and win share organically, or do you expect to support your strategic plan with additional M&As?
We definitely don't need M&A to grow Zenvia Customer Cloud. We have pretty much what we aimed in our strategic cycle a couple of years ago, which is an end-to-end journey from marketing to sales to customer support to customer retention and engagement. We have AI, we have automation, we have multi-channel approach, we have several different tools combined to provide a fully end-to-end solution to our customers. That's why we don't need acquisitions to grow, and majorly, I would say that's the main reason we're very excited about what we built, and the numbers are getting very interesting in that sense, so we really are seeing that we're able to compete not only in Brazil, but also internationally. It's been pretty interesting to see all that happening throughout 2024. That's why we entered 2025 with very good expectations.
A follow-up here, Cassio, on this question. How do you see your positioning outside Brazil?
Sure. As we've been testing in the last two to three years expansion across Latin America, we prepared Zenvia Customer Cloud to be a very competitive product for the region. So as we deployed Zenvia Customer Cloud to these countries outside of Brazil, we've been performing pretty well. Of course, as always, there are some adjustments that we do for each country. But as we finish those adjustments, we see that it's a very competitive solution. So we are structuring our company for growth not only in Brazil, but also internationally.
What are your expectations aside from Zenvia Customer Cloud for 2025? Will you be providing any guidance? So traditionally, we provide guidance for full year when we report Q4. And we expect to do the same this year. So as we report Q4, which we expect to early April, we will be providing guidance for 2025. Are there any synergies lost in Zenvia Customer Cloud from the spin-off of the CPaaS business if it's the case?
We don't see any loss of synergies as we have the possibility of spin-off CPaaS. As Zenvia Customer Cloud is a natural multi-channel solution, we have partnerships for every distinct channel to terminate and actually reach the end user, and in the case that we spin off the CPaaS business, we would do the same for the channels that are provided from these business units with the spin-off operation or any other partner.
Hugo, can you report to see if there are any other last questions?
Sure, Shay. Again, if you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down, and we'll open your microphone. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write "no microphone" at the end of a question, and our operator will read your question aloud.
Hugo, I think we got another one. Any commentary on the funding gap? How does the company looking for 2026, 2027 play out with the cost savings generating from the restructuring? So obviously, the cost savings helps a lot. Just to put into perspective, we are talking about between BRL 30 million- BRL 35 million in 2025, and that compares with the 2024 EBITDA that we provided guidance of between BRL 120 million- BRL 140 million. So it is a sizable savings. We don't see any issues with the medium- and long-term funding gap as we are looking to divest again.
If it's accretive to shareholders and can be used to deleverage the balance sheet, that's one scenario. The other scenario is that with improved EBITDA, as we've been discussing, that will naturally lead to deleveraging the balance sheet. It's just that organically, it takes slightly longer than if we can divest from assets. I don't see any further questions here, Hugo.
Okay. This concludes our Q&A session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Cassio Bobsin for his closing remarks.
Thanks everybody for joining us at this conference call. This movement is a very important one for Zenvia. It closes a long-term strategic cycle started in 2018 when we intended to expand our portfolio to customer experience SaaS. We're very proud to be executing these over the last seven years. We reached a point where we understand we're able to finish the cycle in order to start a new one. It's a very important moment for Zenvia as we outline what will be this new cycle. That's a very important not only a step, but an outline of the future for Zenvia, for our customers, for our shareholders. We're very excited for what the future brings us. It'll be very interesting to join and to share with all you guys our next steps. See you on the next one. Thank you. Thank you very much.
The conference has now concluded. Zenvia's IR area is at your disposal to answer any additional questions. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day.