Everyone, we have an update from Banzai International Inc. It 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. Happy to welcome back Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, Joe Davy. Welcome back, Joe. Excited to hear your update today.
Hey, Anna, thank you. I really appreciate that. First of all, just say thanks for having us back again. We've got a couple of exciting things that have happened in the last 30 to 45 days. I just wanted to provide a quick update on those developments with the company. First of all, this is our disclaimer here. We'll make these slides available on our IR website, so you'll feel free to peruse this at your own leisure. Any forward-looking statements are just that, not subject to being updated, etc. Encourage everyone to go read the full disclaimer. For some reason, our slides aren't coming through 100% perfectly here, but that's okay. We can work with it regardless. The quick summary of Banzai for those of you all who are not familiar with the company is Banzai is an AI-powered SaaS company, and we're building a platform for marketers.
Basically, our goal is to have a platform of different marketing tools, powering kind of mission-critical functions for marketers that ultimately give them superpowers, make their lives 10 times faster or easier, so it's easier for them to get their job done. We like to say, what's the Super Mario mushroom that we give our customers that ultimately makes it easier for them to win the game, which is growing their business, reaching their audience, communicating their message effectively. We do what we do because we love businesses. We love supporting businesses. We love supporting new technologies, great services, great nonprofits. So many of those businesses don't succeed because they never get the marketing right. We want to build tools that make it easy for them to do that and bring the power of AI into those tools to make their lives easier.
We've got a platform of products today, all the way from demand generation, social sharing, video creation, video capture and editing, AI-powered newsletters through Curate, and our AI-powered webinar platform, Demio. We have a variety of solutions, and many of these solutions we started integrating together. For example, our Demio and OpenReel products have some integrations now where, for example, if you run a webinar in Demio, you can pull that right into OpenReel to edit it automatically and use some of OpenReel's AI-powered features like transcript-based editing and other things like that. It's a really powerful solution for marketers. They can solve one problem in Banzai, and then as their needs expand, they can start to solve additional problems. Our vision here is to expand into these additional areas, you know, tracking intelligence, are areas that are kind of white space for us.
We're working on those and thinking about how to approach those markets. That's part of our roadmap. Attracting leads, engaging leads, those are core areas of our business today, and areas that we'll probably invest more in over the next coming quarters and years. It's a little hard to see this slide here. Apologies for that. I think we had some issues with maybe the slides getting imported in here. I'll just point out for the benefit of the emerging growth folks that this wouldn't be a problem in our Demio product. Keep that in mind for next time. I'll go ahead and pull up the slides here so I can walk through these. First of all, we had a very strong Q1 in 2025. We increased revenue 213% year- over- year. We increased gross margin 1,700 basis points, a little more than that, from 82% up from 64.7% previously .
So a major increase in gross margin. We've substantially cleaned up our balance sheet through the end of Q1. We paid off $20.3 million of liabilities, many of them ahead of schedule. That was fantastic. We also secured an $11 million debt facility with institutional investors, which will support acquisitions and ongoing operations. This is a very flexible facility. It doesn't put $11 million of debt on our balance sheet, but gives us the ability to access it if we have acquisitions or things that come up, or investments that we want to make. This is a great thing. We think it's a great asset for the company to have. Use the term asset lightly, but it's a great thing for us, the company, to have access to in terms of flexibility.
We think it will definitely put us in a better position for M&A when we see opportunities come up that are attractive. We have been working on a $13.6 million net income improvement program. This was in progress through Q1. Saw a lot of success there, substantial improvements to net income in Q1. We also saw our customer base increase to now over 90,000 customers across our product suite. Most importantly, we've added a couple of key executives: Dean Ditto as Chief Financial Officer, Michael Kurtzman as Chief Revenue Officer. I'll just talk a little bit about these new hires because I think both of them are really exciting. Dean's background has been the Chief Financial Officer of three companies previously. Dean has been in financial leadership roles at companies ranging from, you know, emerging growth companies to billion-dollar-plus companies.
He's got a very, very wide range of experience and a very, very impressive background. I encourage everybody to go read his bio on our IR website, which contains a lot more detail about him. We're very excited to have him, and I think he's already making an impact here. We're looking forward to continuing to work with him. Michael Kurtzman is our Chief Revenue Officer as of the last few weeks. He has held both CEO and CRO roles previously, SVP of Sales at Panopto, VP of Global Sales at Comcast Technology Solutions. Again, very experienced guy, experienced in taking businesses from, you know, our size to the $100 million revenue level on multiple occasions. We're really excited to have him as part of the team as well. Both of these folks have hit the ground running and have already made a big impact on the team.
That's really the quick update. I'll turn it over for questions if we have them. If you have follow-up questions you don't want to ask now, feel free to reach out to Chris Tyson. His email address is below, and his phone number is on the screen right now. If there are questions right now, I'm happy to answer them.
Thank you, Joe. We're sorry about the technical issues. Why don't we use that? What is your service that you provide and how can it help for things like this? I'm sure a lot of streaming and conferences have these issues. Tell us a little bit about Demio.
Demio is our AI-powered webinar platform. We've owned the business since early 2021, and it's used by just a ton of great companies. I encourage everybody to go check out the website, demio.com. We're the number one rated webinar platform out there. Forbes named it the number one webinar platform for marketers. I think, you know, in terms of the user experience, in terms of some of the little nice things like importing slides and stuff like that, it's fantastic with that. The other major advantage of Demio is that we have launched a couple of cool AI features in Demio, including AI Moderator, that allows you to take content, for example, take a recording of content, put it online, and attach an AI to it that can answer questions for your audience, you know, in any language around the clock.
It's really, really useful for people that have high volumes of webinars, or doing things like this.
As long as the AI Moderator is not taking my job, we will set up a call. All right.
Sounds great.
Mark asks, are you subscription-based? How does it work?
Yes, we are. We do offer, you know, a lot of our customers go through our website, buy directly on our website. Probably about two-thirds of our ARR comes from contracts that are annual or longer. I think up to five years is probably the longest contract that we have. You know, very, very focused on that mid-market to enterprise segment and expanding in that segment where we can really get multi-year customer lock-in.
Perfect. Can you give us an update on Act-On Software and what exactly happened with that?
Yeah, I can. I think we found, especially with the kind of market impact, starting with the market impact from the tariffs back in February through April, we found it hard to put together a financing package for this that we ultimately felt was not going to be really bad for our shareholders in terms of dilution and in terms of share price and everything else. I think we all really liked the Act-On Software deal. I was very bullish on that business. I still think it's a great business. Sometimes, it's just not the right transaction for you and not the right transaction for your shareholders. I think we worked really hard to try to put together something that we felt would work for everybody. Ultimately, we just weren't able to get there on it.
I think it doesn't change our overall strategy of looking at doing acquisitions when we think we can make them make sense for shareholders. I would say, looking at the debt facility that we just put in place, it definitely will support us in doing that in the future by giving us a more clear path to raise capital when needed for things like that.
Perfect. Thank you, Joe, for this update and for everyone interested. It's Banzai International on the NASDAQ: BNZI. Thank you and hope to see you real soon.
Thanks, Anna.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back.