No, that's okay. I'll do that. You just take a quick look at my notes.
Okay. You all ready?
Yep, we're ready.
Let's do it. Welcome back. We have an update from Banzai International Inc. It trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker BNZI. It's a marketing technology company that provides AI-enabled marketing and sales solutions for businesses of all sizes. Happy to welcome Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, Joe Davy, and CFO, Dean Ditto. Welcome, gentlemen. Excited for your update today.
Hey, thanks, Anna. Excited to jump in. First of all, thanks everyone for joining us today. Before we get started, I've just got a quick set of disclaimers for Dean.
Great. Before we get into our presentation, I just want to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast may include predictions, estimates, or other information that may be considered forward looking. While these forward looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions of these statements. You should also review our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks. Your host, Joe, will present results and continue with the presentation.
Okay. Thanks, Dean.
Yeah.
All right. Today we're just going to do a quick review on the company overview, some recent highlights and updates, a quick dive into financial results. Again, this is Dean Ditto, who's our new CFO. Some of you all may not be familiar with him. He's relatively new to the company. I think you've been here, what, about 60 days?
Yep.
He's still getting his feet wet a little bit, but he's coming up to speed very quickly. Thanks for joining us today. Just as a reminder, Banzai, we're an AI-powered SaaS platform for marketing. Our goal is basically to give marketers tools that give them superpowers by leveraging AI to make their lives 10 times faster and easier. We're a SaaS company, so most of our business is a SaaS kind of recurring revenue model like you're familiar with. We're very focused on the martech market. The opportunity here we think is kind of twofold. One is just the massive growth of this market that's been occurring and we think will continue. I think every marketer in the world is going to be touched and impacted by AI, probably already have been to some extent, and I think that's only going to continue to grow.
Secondly is really the opportunity for just consolidation of solutions on a single platform. Marketers are using over 120 different tools. This is leading to very messy customer experiences, messy data. Part of our kind of key thesis here is to improve that by streamlining things, bringing multiple great, best-of-breed, must-have solutions onto a single platform so they can be integrated and work together smoothly. That's the area that we're focused on. We focus on basically, within that world of marketing technology, I think there's kind of four key areas: attracting leads, engaging those leads, gathering information and tracking what's happening with those leads, and ultimately, intelligence about basically underlying data to power marketing campaigns. This is really essential for this business because these are the areas that we think just don't change in marketing, right?
Marketers' needs are going to be the same 10 years from now as they are today. Our business model is just about better enabling our customers with solutions across these areas over time. Just a quick highlight from Q2 results. We saw a 206% increase in revenue year over year. We saw a fairly large, even larger increase in gross profit, about a $2.7 million increase in gross profit. We saw a close to 1,400 basis point increase in gross margin. We are seeing these are kind of the indicators that we look at of is our business growing? Is it ultimately putting it in a better position to be profitable? We're very pleased with these results. We think hopefully we can continue this into the future. That's what we're working on right now, how to do that. Just a quick, you know, highlights.
I'm not going to go through every single one of these, just hit the highlights. Cash balance increased dramatically. Adjusted EBITDA was pretty flat, I think reflecting that we didn't see a lot of growth without seeing a huge downward push on adjusted EBITDA. That's always positive in my opinion. Big increase in annual recurring revenue. We added a few key people, added Dean Ditto, added Michael Kurtzman as Chief Revenue Officer. Really impressive background for him. Expanded our customer base to over 140,000 total customers, including a number of really important enterprise agreements. One that we talked about previously was RBC Capital Markets, among others. Very excited to see that progress. In terms of our priorities for 2025, I think there's essentially four of them. Reduced debt. We just put out a release recently about that, that we've seen a $32.7 million decrease in liabilities and other debt.
That's fantastic. Continued M&A activity. We find good opportunities being able to take advantage of those. Organic growth. That's why Michael's here, among other people that he's added to his team. Strengthening up our leadership team to better support the business as we continue scaling. We're very focused on, again, this kind of 10X impact. We call this internally the Super Mario mushroom. Basically, what's the superpower that our products are giving to our customers? In many cases, that's AI-enabled, automation-enabled. Right now we have kind of nine products across our lineup. We're working on potentially consolidating some of these, potentially expanding some of these. More updates will be coming about the product lineup over the next coming quarter or two. I think we have some exciting stuff that we're working on as well here that we're excited to share with our customers and also with you guys.
We have about 140,000 customers now, so it's a pretty substantial expansion. They range in size from small businesses to the Fortune 500. Obviously, a lot of very recognizable logos here, Cisco, Adobe, Silicon Valley Bank, Thermo Fisher Scientific, RBC Capital Markets, New York Life, UnitedHealth. Great customer base. I think it's just a reflection of the value that we create for these companies. I'd say the kind of fundamental underlying idea here is creating a flywheel to drive customer loyalty. Basically, building great products ultimately leads to growing usage and bringing more users online. Ultimately, that leads us to having more data, which we think of in two ways: one, integration between products, and two, AI context. We can enable AI to be smarter and do more for our customers, which ultimately increases the value of the product.
This flywheel, we think over time, does create a moat for the business. We hope to see that moat continue to grow and ultimately be reflected in increased customer retention, expansion, and revenue. As we're working on our 2025-2026 vision, we are continuing to focus on strategic acquisitions when they come up. Across those four key segments, I think the areas that we're really focused on when we're looking at these opportunities are customer alignment. Is this a solution that our customers need? Is this mission critical for them? Is it profitable? Ultimately, does this help drive the financial strength of the business over time in addition to the strength of our combined solution? It's a few key areas that we're looking at. These are really just ideas. We may do stuff outside of these areas if we find good opportunities. I think there's a lot of opportunities right now.
We're excited to continue pursuing that strategy in addition to our primary strategy of organic growth. Dean?
Great. Thanks, Joe. I'm not going to read every number on the page here, but I would like to highlight some business results. As Joe mentioned, revenue in the second quarter was $3.3 million, which was a $205,000 increase from a similar quarter last year. We look at non-GAAP measures, one being annual recurring revenue, which increased significantly in the second quarter to $12.6 million from $4.5 million in the same period. The gross margin % was very significant, really showing the economics of the business as it stands today and the business that we can grow upon. Our gross margin increased to 83%, which was almost a 1,400 basis point increase. Operating expenses increased as a result of business acquisitions primarily. I also want to move down to the bottom of the page there and highlight that cash and cash equivalents increased significantly in the period ended June 30.
Yeah, thanks, Dean.
You're welcome.
In closing, very strong Q2 results. Grew stockholders’ equity substantially, increased cash balance substantially, expanded customer base substantially. We added a few really great new faces to the team who have been just making a big impact so far, including Dean here. Thank you all so much for the time today. Anna, I think if we have any questions, happy to turn it back over to you.
Awesome. Thank you, guys. We do have questions for you, but we are out of time because we have to jump to the next presenter. I do want to ask, Adam says, how is Banzai able to expand from 90,000 to 140,000 clients so quickly? Do you want to close with that, a little bit about that good news?
Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of our products use a PLG model. Customers can buy many of our products just directly on our website, bypass our sales team to do that. A lot of times what we find is many of those customers are smaller. A lot of times we find that some of those customers have potential to be really big customers. We found a lot of our great enterprise customers just by companies that came through, bought on our website with a credit card, and then ultimately turned into $50,000 or $100,000 accounts for us. That's a big focus area for us going forward.
Wonderful. We certainly appreciate you jumping on here with this update, and we look forward to the next one real soon. Thank you, Adam.