Banzai International Inc. trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol BNZI. It's a marketing technology company that provides AI-enabled marketing and sales solutions for businesses of all sizes. Please welcome co-founder, chairman, and CEO Joe Davy. Nice to see you on the conference today, Joe.
Great to see you, Anna. Always fun to get to spend a little bit of time with you.
Awesome. I agree. Can't wait to hear more about your presentation. The floor is yours.
Thanks. We just released our 10K this week, so we're really excited to share some updates on what we've been up to, a lot of huge progress that we made over the last few months. Today, first of all, I want to thank everybody for joining, and I want to thank Emerging Growth for hosting us, and thank you, Anna, for moderating this. Happy to dive into this and tell everybody a little bit more about Banzai for those of you all who are not familiar with the company. First of all, I'll say all of these slides are available on our IR website. There are things like forward-looking statements in here. Please go read the disclaimer at length on your own on our website before making any investing decisions. I'll leave it at that. I'll tell you a little bit about Banzai.
Banzai is based on the big idea that AI is fundamentally disrupting the way that marketing works. Basically, companies are looking for greater efficiency. They're looking to do more with less. This is an ongoing trend. We'll talk a little bit about the market in a minute. My personal belief is that AI is going to disrupt many, many things over the next 10 years, but especially jobs that are done behind a keyboard and mouse. Our mission at Banzai is really to enable our customers with AI-powered tools that help them do their job more effectively. In other words, help them connect with their customers, help them connect with their market. Ultimately, we feel like we've succeeded when our customers have succeeded.
We think that so many companies develop amazing products, develop amazing services, have amazing missions, but they do not succeed ultimately because they are not able to effectively take those ideas to market. We build tools that give our customers superpowers that make their lives 10 times faster and easier to connect with their customers, to grow their customer base. That is really what we are all about. We are working every day to pull in that time horizon of the things we can leverage AI for, leverage integration, leverage automation for, to help make our customers more efficient and ultimately help businesses succeed. That is what gets us out of bed every day, just a belief that we want to help more businesses, more organizations succeed in the market. This is a huge and growing market.
I think digital transformation and, again, the kind of efficiency gains and everything that come out of automation and AI drive a lot of this market. Marketers struggle with an explosion of vendors and complexity that results from that. This market has grown from $329 billion in 2022 to $494 last year. Right now, it's forecast to grow at an 18.5% CAGR over the next few years. There is a huge opportunity here for us to grow along with this market. That's really a big part of our focus right now. Talk a little bit about what we accomplished in 2024 since we just put this out. First of all, we achieved a roughly 267% annual growth. When you look at our pro forma consolidated revenue, which was just shy of $17 million, we exceeded our guidance by 67%.
That is obviously a huge accomplishment for the company. I think we are looking to continue that growth this year, hopefully. We feel like we have a good plan to do that. As part of this, we have also been looking at the financial strength of the company. We completed a $20.3 million debt repayment ahead of schedule in Q1. We fully satisfied outstanding debt obligations to many, many key vendors. This is going to reflect in material benefit to both net income and shareholders' equity for Q1. We think this is really huge for shareholders. Basically, our goal here is to do a couple of things. One, obviously, build fantastic products for our customers. Two, over time, build the financial strength of this company. I think this is a huge milestone that we accomplished there.
We're very close to having all of those outstanding obligations paid off. This solves for probably 80%-90% of the total of what was out there under that restructuring plan. We're very, very happy about the progress that we've made there. Our Q4 annual recurring revenue, which we calculate as basically 12 times the last period revenue, was $6.8 million. This was a 54% sequential increase from Q3 2024. A lot of growth in ARR between those quarters. We're going to see this grow again in Q1. Look for that. We're very excited to be able to share that as well. Our FY 2024 adjusted EBITDA was negative $6.5 million, which was a $5.4 million improvement from 2023. Again, just improving the financial strength of the company, getting more efficient.
Frankly, this was a year where we did a lot of acquisitions, where we did a lot of other things. We think this really represents just the growing efficiency of the business. Obviously, this puts us on a very, very strong path given our now much stronger revenue going into 2025. We also made a couple of acquisitions. We acquired Viddello, which is a software provider for video hosting and marketing solutions, and OpenReel, which is an enterprise video creation platform. Very excited about both of those. Already seeing customer cross-sale opportunities and close one deals there. That is extremely gratifying. We signed a definitive agreement to acquire Act-On Software, which is an enterprise marketing automation platform provider. This is expected to increase our 2025 revenue by $27 million on a pro forma basis.
Obviously, that is subject to the satisfaction of the closing conditions. We're working on that deal right now. We have announced three acquisitions. We have closed two of them. We're working on the third right now. We have grown our customer base just astronomically from 2,700 customers in 2023 to over 90,000 customers as of March 31, 2025. Very, very satisfied with the growth in the customer base. Very satisfied with the economics. We also launched Trade Studio 4. This is the newest version of our award-winning video creation product. We launched Curate, which is an AI-powered newsletter platform that basically makes it easier for customers to build and grow newsletters without having to do all the hard work of finding, curating, writing content, and marketing that newsletter that uses AI to do all of it for you.
It's a very, very powerful tool for customer engagement, for attracting new leads and expanding brand awareness. I'll just run through this very quickly because we already talked about this, but huge achievement with this $20 million debt repayment. This basically eliminates the majority of the outstanding payables from the 2023 business combination that we did. We also reduced our balance owed to Columbia Pacific. We've reduced that substantially since September when we announced this plan. We completed a number of these payoffs ahead of schedule, months ahead of schedule in many cases. I think this just reflects the financial strength of the company. This will impact the financial results for FY 2024, but also mainly for Q1 2025. Keep an eye out for that. We're very excited about that. Talk a little bit about our strategy here.
Our game plan, what we're doing as a company, is basically putting together award-winning products under a single brand, the Banzai brand, integrating those products and AI-enabling those products. What we've done with the acquisitions of OpenReel and Viddello, we've put these together with our existing Dimeo asset to create Banzai Video, which is a powerful video marketing platform that does everything from webinars, live and automated webinars, to 3D video creation, video hosting and marketing, and video capture creation and editing. This is a really powerful suite of tools for customers. Customers can buy any of these tools individually, and then they can add any of them on. Right now, we're working on product integrations that will make these things work seamlessly together. As I said, on a 2024 basis, delivered $16.7 million in pro forma consolidated revenue across Banzai plus OpenReel and Viddello.
Grew the business substantially, 270%, roughly 267%, compared to our 2023 standalone revenue, which was $4.6 million. We are seeing substantial growth in the business. Part of our goal here is just to get this business to scale. I think we've demonstrated that we're doing that. I also think it's a huge win for customers. Talk about Viddello. This is a very exciting business for us. First of all, this scene here that you're seeing, this character in background, are Viddello assets. You can get this as part of Create Studio. If you want to build Pixar-style 3D videos, go to createstudio.com. You can sign up. This is a fantastic product.
It includes over 1,000 pre-built characters, scenes, templates, other assets that you can use to create really, really high-quality video without having to have any background in 3D, without having to have any background in video. Anybody can do this. In 15 minutes, you can put this together. We even have an AI feature that will actually build your videos for you. You just tell it what you want a video about, and it will put it together for you. I strongly encourage everybody to go to createstudio.com and check out that product. Use it in your own business. People use this for ads, for social posts, for explainer videos. This is used by everyone from influencers and small businesses all the way up to very large companies. It is super exciting. We have over 85,000 customers that own this product.
This drove $6.1 million in revenue in calendar year 2024. This company has four products: Create Studio, which is the product I just mentioned; Viddello, which is the video hosting platform; Twinkle, which is a royalty-free music platform; and Photo Vibrance, which lets customers easily turn static images into really cool animations using AI. Go check those out. I hope you love those products. I think they're just really, really incredible products. Customers love them. We couldn't be more happy to add Viddello to the Banzai family. Tell you a little bit about OpenReel. OpenReel is an enterprise platform for capturing, creating, and editing branded videos for the enterprise.
Basically, the superpower of this product is it makes it really, really easy for anybody in the organization to create high-quality branded video that the marketing team is going to be happy with because it's going to be brand compliant. It's going to have all the look and feel of all your corporate videos. You don't have to go through your video team. You don't have to wait weeks or months to put this together. This is a super powerful product. If you're interested in using this in your business, go check it out: openreel.com. This is used by a lot of big enterprise customers: Lone Depot, Autodesk, Dell, RBC Capital Markets. They use this to enable their teams to go create videos much, much faster, much less friction. One of the coolest features of this product, which I love, is AI-powered video editing.
You can take a video that you capture. You can go look at the transcript, and you can change the words. You can cut, edit, cut down clips just based on the transcript. It is much, much easier than having to go through and use a traditional video editing tool to do all that editing. It makes this easy enough that anybody can do it. I am very excited to have OpenReel as part of the family as well. Our Dimeo product is super exciting. We added over 1,800 new customers in 2024. We expanded our CRM and marketing automation integrations with Salesforce, with HubSpot, with a number of different platforms. This product makes it really, really easy for anybody in your business to run powerful, branded, automated webinars. We used this for our earnings call last week if you were on that call, or sorry, earlier this week, I should say.
The superpower here is that this is easy enough to use that anybody can do it. We have a lot of companies now that are deploying this to make it easy for their team members to run webinars without having to go through that walled garden. We are very excited about that. The Act-On acquisition, this is what we are working on right now. This is very accretive to us from a revenue standpoint. Again, on a combined basis, we will take our revenue to right around $44 million. Enterprise customer base with companies like Hitachi, Best Buy, Sharp, Flextronics, Redline Hotels, many, many, many more. We feel that these guys have done an amazing job of investing in their product and building AI-powered features for that product. We are really excited to add this to our family. We are actively working on getting this to a close right now.
We will have more information about that in the coming days and weeks. Finally, we launched this product, Curate, in Q4 of last year. This is a really cool product. As I said earlier, this allows customers to create and launch branded, customized newsletters. It writes itself. You tell it the news that your audience is interested in. It goes and finds relevant things happening in the world, writes articles for you, publishes those articles to a website for you that you can link to your website, brand it however you want, grows itself by integrating with our Reach offering, by allowing you to specify the target audience that you are looking for and inviting those people to subscribe.
This is a product that really, if you want to launch a newsletter and you don't want to do any work, our goal with this product was to really bring down the barrier by 90% in terms of the cost and effort to launch and run a newsletter. We're super excited about this product. We've already got a number of companies using this, and we're very excited about the future of this product. As I said, we have over 90,000 customers that range in size from small businesses all the way to the Fortune 500. This obviously includes many small businesses, many agencies, solopreneurs, but it also includes big companies like Capital One, like Lone Depot, The Economist, like Cisco, like RBC, like RingCentral, like HubSpot, like ServiceNow. We've got a very diversified customer base across financial services, technology, healthcare.
I think most importantly, our products and our business model are really kind of tariff-proof in a way. We think that we're very unlikely to be impacted by any of the kind of current uncertainty around that issue. These are customers love these products. We typically see customer satisfaction levels in the 95%-100% range across this product line. We've got great customer relationships, and we're continuing to invest more in the mid-market and enterprise right now. Our big picture vision really revolves around what we call the four horsemen of marketing technology. We think about marketing technology in terms of things that customers are going to want to do that just aren't going to change much over time.
I think those things really come down to attracting leads, engaging their customers and leads to drive opportunities, tracking what's working for them, and ultimately getting the right data so they can make the right business decisions. These are the same things marketers were doing 10 years ago, 50 years ago, and I think it's going to be the same things that marketers are doing 10 years from now. The tools evolve, the channels evolve, but the fundamental goals really remain the same. Our vision is basically building a platform that fills out this wheel, that integrates with these other platforms that we know our customers are already using, and that solve a variety of new problems for them. Our business model really comes down to land and expand. A lot of customers come to us through a single product.
You can kind of picture this like going to a baseball game. There are lots of ways to get into the stadium, but once you're in the stadium, everyone is buying the same beers, the same pretzels, the same hot dogs. That's the model here. We want to get customers in the door on one of our products, and then through our integrations, through our streamlined workflows, we want to enable our customers to easily add on additional solutions. We're targeting a 10% cross-sale rate per business unit, meaning we expect this to be accretive to organic growth. Even if we don't add new customers, we expect to see existing customers grow. Obviously, this is a much more efficient model. We've seen this model work at other companies really, really well.
As we expand our product lineup, we expect to see this accelerate our growth, and we're really excited about that. You can imagine launching a new product like Curate is a lot easier when you have 90,000 existing customers that you can go offer that product to. Our vision is really to build a moat through two key things: integrations and AI enablement. First, integrations. Shared data and assets between all of our products just make it easier for customers to buy additional solutions from us. For example, if a customer runs a webinar on our Dimeo product, they can easily find those assets in our OpenReel product to edit them and turn them into production-ready videos, and then they can host those videos on our Viddello platform and deploy them to their website or social or wherever else they want to deploy them.
AI enablement, I think, is really a big key here. AI is all about context. It's all about the data that that AI has access to that enables it to be smarter about the problems it's trying to solve and ultimately enable new capabilities. Over time, we believe that as we add more products to our lineup, we'll have more data, we'll have more context, and as a result, we'll build a moat in terms of the AI features that we can build and enable. A great example of this is our Demio product, where we've launched an AI moderator feature that allows our customers to attach an AI to their automated webinars that can interact with their attendees, answer their questions, talk about the presentation or talk about the business, and ultimately could help customers scale greatly rather than having to have humans do that work.
It can also enable customers to identify which leads or which customers they need to follow up on. That is just one example, but we are working on many, many more. I think this is going to be a very, very powerful moat for us over time. Our flywheel really revolves around a similar concept. Again, we build products that give our customers superpowers. We define that as a 10x advantage in doing something, so making it 10 times faster or 10 times easier for them to do something that they want to do.
In a lot of cases, that enables customers to do stuff they've never been able to do before, like make 3D videos that might have been cost-prohibitive before or enable their entire sales force to run webinars or build customer interviews on their own because it probably would have been too much of an effort to have all that go through a central team. As we build those products, we drive usage and grow our user base. Driving usage and growing our user base gives us more data and more content that we can ultimately leverage to improve customer efficiency and improve what we're doing with AI by adding that data to our asset library, by integrating that data across products, by adding that to our AI context. Obviously, that automation and AI just increases the superpowers of our products.
This is really a simple, simple way of looking at our business, but I think it really sums up how we create a moat over time and how we increase customer loyalty and hopefully NRR and other things over time. Our vision in terms of strategic acquisitions is, again, really to focus on this wheel. We're very focused on four key areas. We look at, first and foremost, profitability and customer alignment. We're looking to buy profitable businesses with products that we think either their customer base would want to buy our existing products or vice versa, or ideally both. The way that we see this in the long run is looking at areas like advertising, like learning management, customer success, like attribution, and like marketing ETL as investment opportunities. We have a continued focus on this.
We have a pipeline of companies that we're working with right now, and we're very excited to see how this plays out over the next year, two years as we find great opportunities. We hope to add additional solutions to this lineup and offer them to our customers. Finally, we'll just talk a little bit about Q4 in 2024. First of all, our adjusted net income greatly improved from negative $9.2 million in 2023 to negative $1.4 million in 2024, basically reflecting substantial increases in efficiency in the company, which we're very, very proud of. A lot of hard work went into this. Obviously, our teams have been working very, very hard to improve that efficiency, but we're glad that that's finally being reflected here. Sorry, that was for the three months ended. For the 12 months ended, about negative $12 million and negative $11.9 million, so roughly similar.
I think when you look at that Q4, you can see that we've made substantial improvements since we announced this net income improvement plan. That's about a $7.8 million improvement already, and we expect to see that continue into Q1. Finally, looking at 2025, right now with our existing businesses, we are forecasting that we will be profitable in 2025, and we're forecasting that we'll come in just around $20 million in total revenue on an organic basis. Now, again, we're looking at acquisition opportunities that we may see this number move up if we can close on those opportunities. I think that's a big thing here, but again, just the continued focus on financial strength of the business and continued focus on looking at those strategic acquisition opportunities to deliver above and beyond this plan.
In closing, we had very, very strong 2024 revenue growth, 267% to $16.7 million, substantially cleaned up our balance sheet, $20.3 million paid off ahead of schedule. We have implemented a $12.2 million net income improvement program that is in progress and has been going very well. We have made very strong sales and marketing execution advancements across our product lineup. We have got a great blue chip customer base, over 90,000 customers, very scalable business model, very minimal exposure to tariff risk, and what we think is a very strong outlook for 2025. We are really excited to continue to make progress this year. I just want to thank everybody for joining, and I am happy to answer any questions. If you have any questions that you do not want to ask here, you can always send them to our IR team.
Their information is below, but I'll turn it back over to you, Anna.
Great, Joe. Great products, really useful products that I'm excited to dive into as well. A few questions. Filippo asks, how specifically does your platform capture engagement or customers better than the competition? If you can talk about your differentiating factors.
Yeah, I'll give you two examples. First of all, our video marketing platform, a lot of our customers today use something like Vimeo or YouTube to host their videos. These tools, yeah, great. I mean, they do a fine job of hosting video, but they don't really do anything for you in terms of the marketing side. Our Viddello product allows you to do things like A/B testing. For example, you can upload multiple versions of a video. You can A/B test which ones customers watch, how long they watch, which parts they drop off on, all kinds of things like that. Ultimately, you can figure out what makes your customers tick. Another great example is our Dimeo product.
Unlike many other online live streaming products, not to throw shade at GoTo or anything like that, but our Dimeo product enables you to see every person that's joining your events, when they're joining, how focused they are, when they're watching your screen. When they click away, when they've got you minimized in the background, it really lets you see everything about who are the most engaged people watching your content, participating in your conversations. We have tons of other features, analytics, pre-event analytics, follow-ups, all kinds of things like that that make it really easy for you, your sales team to know what's going on and ultimately connect with the right folks.
Gary asks, who are your target customers? Would it be small online business owners, maybe large corporate enterprises, both?
That's a great question. We're really focused on the mid-market and enterprise right now. Many of our products have a PLG strategy, which means customers can go online and buy them with a credit card, and that's great, and we're happy when customers do that. Our focus right now is really growing our enterprise and mid-market customer base. We've seen a lot of growth in the healthcare space. We've seen a lot of growth in the financial services space, and we've seen a lot of growth in the technology space. We're really focused on that strategy. We've scaled up our sales team quite a bit. We're working on customer success and customer marketing. We're doing things like customer events in many, many cities around the U.S. right now. The strategy is going really well for us, and we're seeing a lot of growth coming from those areas.
Mashari wants you to talk a little bit about your stock. What specific catalysts do you anticipate in Q2 to stabilize or drive short-term stock price growth?
Great question. First of all, I think we're going to release Q1 numbers in Q2, which I think will more fully reflect the benefit of these acquisitions on a GAAP basis. Keep an eye out for that, but I think that's going to be kind of a big eye-opener for the market in terms of what we've done. A lot of that didn't get reflected in Q4 just because much of it has happened subsequently. I think you're going to see that reflected in Q1, and I think you're going to see it more reflected even in our Q2 financials probably. I think hopefully we're looking at, again, additional acquisitions and driving additional scale, and hopefully we'll continue to reflect that in our GAAP financials over time throughout the rest of the year. I think that's the biggest thing.
Talon asks, when did the company go public and how did it go public? Was it a SPAC or IPO or reverse merger?
Yeah, it was a SPAC and went public in 2023.
Okay, great. How much do you spend with how much does a customer spend with you on a monthly basis on average, and is that number increasing?
Great question. Customers, it really varies between product, but yes, we have seen that number increase. I would say for a product like Create Studio, the ACVs could be as low as $500, but for a product like OpenReel, the ACVs are more like $14,000-$15,000. We've seen the ACVs increasing across the customer base in the last year, and we've seen the net retention increasing across the customer base as well. We expect that as we start to see more benefit of the cross-sales in our customer base, we're going to see those numbers continue to move up.
Last question for you from Max. How do you scale further? Can you form partnerships with Wix or Shopify, Amazon? What's the future?
That's a fantastic question. We actually just launched a partner program in the last 30 to 45 days. We've got a number of really great partners that are in the pipeline that we're working on closing deals with right now. Can't share too much about that right now, but I think there's going to be some really exciting things happening in our partner program. I would say we're really focused more on companies that are kind of enterprise and mid-market resellers and enterprise and mid-market technology advisors. We expect that that's going to help accelerate organic customer adoption. The other thing I would say, again, just back to the cross-sale strategy, we already have a meaningful customer base, and we have an ability to go back to that customer base and offer them additional upgrades or additional products.
I'll give you a fantastic example of this with our Create Studio product. We just started launching monthly content drops where every single month we're going to be delivering new content to the Create Studio product. Many customers on Create Studio don't yet have an all-access license that gives them access to that content. We just did the very first one in the last week or two where we launched an Easter content bundle, basically a bunch of templates, assets related to Easter, so people who want to create videos related to the Easter holiday coming up. We've seen a number of customers on the Create Studio product upgrade to that all-access program to get access to that. That expands our ACV. It increases our recurring revenue. We've also seen Dimeo customers buying Create Studio.
We're looking at opportunities for enterprise adoption of Create Studio. I think there's a lot of ways that we can just leverage our existing customer base for growth as well.
We have time for a little bit more. Ashton asks, the 18% CAGR was what is that specifically? Was it for online marketing?
Yeah, I would say I would reference the report that that was attached to, which was we publicly filed it, but it was a study done by Winterberry Group. It basically looks at digital marketing, and it excludes things like advertising, but it looks at software and services around digital marketing, attribution, video, things like that.
Taryn asks, was the debt repayment canceling any convertible notes?
Yes, it was. We managed to pay off a large outstanding convertible as a part of that, which was very satisfying, obviously. At this point, we do not have any variable rate paper anywhere in our capital structure.
Can you give an idea on cost, your webinar platform, the newsletter platform, the marketing?
Yeah, absolutely. These are all designed to be accessible to small businesses and scalable for enterprise businesses. Many of our products start as cheap as $500 a year and go up to, I think the largest opportunity in our pipeline right now is over $1 million. I would say if you're a small business owner, if you're an agency, many of these products you can buy just on the website. Go to banzai.io. You can find links to all of our products there, or you can reach out directly. If you reach out to our IR firm right there, they will put you in touch with our team, and they can help you get set up. Our goal is to basically make all of our products accessible from a price point.
As our customers' usage grows and as they deploy across their enterprise or as their business grows, we can scale with them and we can help them do more.
Perfect. Joe, thank you so much. Really interesting products you have here. We appreciate you being on the Emerging Growth Conference, and we welcome you back for more updates in the future.
Thanks so much, Anna. Great to see you as always.
All right. Thank you, everyone. We'll be right back.